A Trenchless Sewer Line Replacement Might be Better
Just about the worst news that you can receive is that your sewer lines will need to be replaced. In practice, this means that some heavy equipment will have to dig a huge trench through the middle of your manicured lawn.
After the trench is wide and deep enough, a crew will attempt to remove the old pipes. After all, newer sewer pipes need to be installed. So, up to this point, you can think of replacing your old sewer lines as taking three steps: digging through your yard and making a trench, digging up the old sewer line, and installing new sewer pipes.
Each of these steps is prone to setbacks, delays, and additional costs. At the end of the day, replacing your old sewer line could cost upwards of $20,000 depending on how easy it is to pull up the old connections and install new ones.
These charges, unfortunately, are the cost of doing business since you’re paying for the use of a lot of heavy equipment to dig the trench and multiple days of labor, perhaps at union wages. It all adds up and can make you wish that there were some kind of alternative to this costly and error-prone process.
More plumbing contractors than ever before are offering their clients trenchless sewer line replacements because these are more affordable and easier to install than ever before. The technology behind trenchless sewer line replacements has been around for more than a decade, but the technology has recently become much more affordable. Hence the uptick in contractors making use of this amazing technology over the last few years.
There are two basic ways to go about trenchless sewer line replacement or contractor repair – trenchless pipe lining and trenchless pipe bursting. Both procedures for installing trenchless sewer line replacements are minimally invasive and more affordable than paying for heavy equipment and excavation.
The trenchless pipe bursting method goes something like this – a crew will come to your home or workplace and dig two small pits at opposite ends of the problematic sewer line. You might already be able to tell that this has the advantage of being a more manageable footprint than traditional excavation and sewer line replacement.
The basic idea with trenchless pipe bursting is that you’re going to make two pits – one for entry and the other for exit. A head will feed into the entry pit and be pulled along with an undertaker assembly, a device used to pull the feed from one end of the pit to another end. A pipe bursting head is another instrument used in the pipe bursting method of trenchless sewer line replacement; this device is intended to be fed through the in situ pile.
When the head of the pipe is pulled through it essentially turns the old, and no-longer-usable, pipe into smithereens. Then, state-of-the-art HDPE piping is pulled into position in place of the old pipe. Isn’t that wonderful? Your new sewer line connection should flow even better.
Congratulations, you’ve just turned a job that could have stretched out to multiple days and cost you tens of thousands of dollars into a job that should take half a day and run no more than $5,000.
Trenchless pipe lining is the other way to install a trenchless sewer line. The big difference between the trenchless pipe lining method and the trenchless pipe bursting method is that the latter involves two pits and the former, trenchless pipe lining, only involves having to dig one pit.
The beautiful thing about a trenchless pipe lining is that your old sewer line can remain where it is. So, how does this work then? Contractors will only have to dig one hole in order to install a new lining over your existing sewer pipe. A resin-coated tube sleeve is essentially enfolded over your existing sewer line. At half the cost of traditional sewer line replacement, you’ll like having this option.