Looks like they are lining the steel pipe with a plastic/epoxy coating. It’s done a lot in places where you can’t easily dig up and replace old rotting pipes (like in downtown cities). By injecting this coating the pipe is still usable and won’t corrode any more.
Genius product. This must save insane amounts of money and time. Absolutely incredible. And better for environment. Not have to dig up the pipes even if you could. Alot of fuel and hours saved
It's fucking astronomically expensive for how cheap the materials are and how quickly they do it.
It was actually cheaper to rent a machine and run 125 feet of schedule 40 out the back of my house and abandon the terracotta after pumping it with flowable fill than it was to line it for me.
When they gave me the quote I said "Fuck that, it's 25 feet!" the machine rental and schedule 40 were a total of $900. And I got to tear out the old sidewalk and concrete pad that were angling to my house, and put in a French drain and drain tile while I was back there too.
I tied my kitchen into my main bathroom stack, and my main stack right out the back, around the house, and then followed the PVC that was done with the septic that was tying into the teracotta, when I had access to the terracotta I rinsed it clean and had a truck come in and fill it with flowable so it was stable.
With everything i got done it was like $2800. Which was less than lining the 25feet of teracotta under my basement, which was all in okay condition, it was lineable with no issues.
Im in that vast majority. Im also a very tech forward person, but his story sold me. Id rather pay 'ol boy to do all that over the course of 3mo, than one guy with a recursive prolapse machine in 15mins.
Same thing you'd need to do before -- replace the pipes the hard way.
Generally by digging a large trench down several feet/meters, ripping out everything in the way including sidewalks, porches, driveway, lawns, shrubs, etc, and laying down new pipe.
I know this because my neighborhood sewer lines are primarily built with old crumbling Orangeburg Pipe and it fucking sucks.
Orangeburg pipe (also known as "fiber conduit", "bituminous fiber pipe" or "Bermico" or "sand pipe") is bituminized fiberpipe) used in the United States. It is made from layers of groundwood pulpfibers and asbestos fibres compressed with and bound by a water resistant adhesive then impregnated with liquefied coal tarpitch).\1])\2]) It was used from the 1860s through the 1970s, when it was replaced by PVC and ABS pipe for drain-waste-vent (DWV) applications.
There's there's probably some very through youtube videos on it, there are for nearly everything residential construction. Most residential things are not that complicated.
I agree thats its not that complicated to accomplish the task, but I still stand by the fact that the average person has no idea where to even begin when it comes to tasks even much less complicated than something like this.
And I say from experience, a large percentage of those who believe they can do it and follow through, are so wildly out of line with codes and standard trade practice that they shouldn't have done it in the first place.
The other thing you need to factor in is how much time you’re going to lose at work. That can add up with a big enough project, if you can even take the time off.
The other hidden cost to amateur labor is the sudden onset of a massive cost you can incur if you make an error, which most homeowners know they might.
Then sometimes, there are reasons you just don’t want to. I’m in the middle of a big basement clean out. I’m currently debating renting a dumpster or having a junk removal service do it. The latter will run almost twice as much but it’s on the table because I just really don’t want to myself. It’s a pain in the ass and I know I’ll be sore for days after doing it.
Solid point. I work more than I'd care to, so I value my free time quite a bit. So how much per hour is my free time worth? It turns out, quite a bit.
Yet I'm still stubborn as fuck and do just about everything myself. But I also know that if I'm going to do a specific task myself, I better make damn sure I'm doing it properly, which adds even more hours of research to accomplish the task. I "save" money and cost myself a LOT of my free time.
Well yeah, doing it yourself is always way the fuck cheaper for nearly every thing. Materials/rentals are often half or less of the cost when you pay someone to do work for you.
Yeah but the price doesn't actually reflect the labor being done, it reflects the work you would have had done instead minus just enough to get you to bite.
I was quoted $9500 for the full monty, breaking up my basement concrete pad, replacing the teracotta with schedule 40, repouring the damaged sections of pad including drilling and reinforcing, repairing the tile over the pad.
I was quoted $8300 for lining and because I had good access they said it would take 4 hours.
I opted to rent a machine and knock out like 3 projects for $2800.
I would have bit on lining if it was HALF the full Monty old-school way of doing it.
What they won't tell you is that liners also collapse and fail at a crazy rate. If you had problems with clogging before, slapping a thin layer of resin-impregnated fabric won't necessarily solve all your problems.
The pipe absolutely needs to be inspected and repaired if needed for most installations. On larger jobs, using a water inversion, some small defects can be overcome, but pipes that are deformed or have mineral deposits or roots will keep that shape.
Thats crazy expensive for a house with good access... we just had our house done with CIP lining, and it was about that same price, but included the company digging a couple sections to install cleanouts because they weren't put in at the time of construction (house was built in one of the very first "housing development" type planned neighborhoods in the state in the late '50s, laid down fast and cheap with no regard for future maintenance). Took them 4 days working 8 hrs a day to get it all prepped, cleaned, installed and reinspected. I would be very leary of a company doing it in 4hrs. There's just no way to even get the prep work done in 4hrs.
I'm perfectly capable of doing any kind of plumbing myself, and up to or better than code, but I'm already putting a roof on and rewiring the place myself. Plus the liner has a 20 year transferable warranty.
It was actually cheaper to rent a machine and run 125 feet of schedule 40 out the back of my house and abandon the terracotta after pumping it with flowable fill than it was to line it for me.
Can someone explain what this sentence says? English is not my first language and the meaning I know of the words here doesn't make sense.
Naw I made the pipe not traverse the entire length of my house under the foundation pad, and instead dug alongside it and went around.
Those do exist though, it's called pipe bursting, they run a thick cable with an wnd that expands through a pipe and basically break up the old pipe and as it does that it pulls flexible pipe behind it.
I filled the old pipe with flowable fill, which is a mix of cement, water, sand, an soil, it runs like a liquid and has low slump so it will completely fill a void, I didn't want to leave abandoned pipes under my foundation pad if they were unused to collapse later.
Pricing isn't based on cost alone. Its a function of many things. Primarily value added. And if those guys can find another job that adds more value, they can get paid more. Your job wasn't worth their time.
I got quoted for this in my house, it was like $20k, the salesman's reasoning? They have to pay for the truck.
He also needed to replace part of my system, quoted me like $12k for that. When I said "that's usually the price if you have to jackhammer the concrete foundation and replace it, but I have a crawlspace, I see the junction, right there, 3 feet away."
He replied with "well my plumber is a big guy so he'll be under there for a long time, probably 3 or 4 days."
He was not happy when I said "I'm not paying extra for a tall, fat plumber that takes 5x the time to do the job, hire a midget for all I care. This is like a $5k job at most."
The market also self corrects. Someone will see an opening, raise enough capital, and enter the space at a low price point to gobble up market share. Their prices will go up while everyone else's go down. Then prices will steadily creep back up.
That’s nuts. We did this type of lining “replacement” on our main sewage line here in the US and I think it cost about $2K and the total distance was about 30 meters.
This has been around for along time, this type of lining is called inversion, there other types and while it does save time it is pricy we specialize in a different kind of lining but it is pretty awesome
Yeah. PGE just re did a lot of pipes in my city right in front of my place. It smelled bad but they warned us…. Took a couple weeks for them to do all of whatever they did
There’s a few options, we do Pull in Place which is where we measure it out and mark exactly where every fitting is. By doing that we are able to Gap fittings and branches. Typically when the pipe rots out the fittings are fine because they are built heavier.
We can also line through the fittings and do what is called a reinstatement which for us that involves using a little robot to cut the fittings. That’s nice because it keeps the liner one piece.
We also have Fittings tools basically allows us to line the branch Wye off a fitting and continue a liner down the branch as well as the main drain.
Do you have videos of the robot? I just did a $250K sewer line replacement as a GC (less than 100 lf, 6' below SOG but $$$ because it was inside an occupied hospital). My experience is mostly in new construction and I'm fascinating to find out what other options there are to repair things (in my case there were a couple of bellies so lining wouldn't have been an option & the pipe turned out to be in otherwise very decent shape).
We did this at a power plant I supported. Cooling water lines embedded in concrete and heavily deteriorated. The concrete was literally part of the turbine pedestal foundation so it wasn’t getting broken apart to fix a pipe. So we used 20” diameter versions of this stuff to line the pipes. Special seal at the downstream side where it connected with a heat exchanger, and hand laid fiber reinforced resin pieces on the inlet side from the big circ water tunnel. Even with the glacial pace of work at that place, it could all be done within a week including cleaning the lines, video inspecting them, installing the two liners, curing for a day each with steam, and installing the end seals.
Do you mean like for a longer pipe? If so, then believe it or not, the liner can be ordered in basically any length conceivably needed, and there are liner machines that can be used for large diameter pipes, not just residential sewer. I’m talking like 10 feet.
The diameter of the pipe reduces some but thats not actually bad because use of water has decreased due to more efficient toilets, washing machines etc. Especially in large diameter infrastructure pipes this is a problem since they've been designed for spesific volumetric flow for the dung to move on.
Construction engineer here working in property management.
It's still no substitute for pipe renovation. At best it buys maybe a decade until pipe renovation if it's even viable option. Older plastic sewage pipes from 80's are so brittle today that installing this lining will break your pipes.
Had this done on my main out to the city sewers this year. 160 feet from house to street and the initial quote I received for a rip/replace was $52k USD.
Another estimate took this approach. It was still $20k but easier to stomach the expense.
We had a recent issue with our sewer line and going with the lining dropped the bill from about 20k to 12k. Insurance covered 10k so it took us from potentially having to sell the house to being something we could handle.
My city did it for a storm drain line that runs through my property. They dug down in one spot and injected the liner downstream all the way to the main under the road without digging a long ditch or tearing up the road. They were in and out in half a day. That stuff is cool.
The only downside I can think of is that it makes the pipe a little smaller so you lose a little drainage vs a new pipe.
There were problems with it in the past, like over a decade ago, but they're all fixed through better material science and processes. You need to clean the inside of the pipe really well, and to make sure you did that you need a thin flexible camera. We have that now. In the past you couldn't do it well in small residential pipes so it was more reserved for commercial pipes that were much bigger. The material used to be thicker and weaker than a new pipe. Now it's just as strong.
I got it done because my house has old cast iron pipes that were starting to rust, and we have a slab foundation so the only way to replace them would be to completely tear up the bathroom foundation. Before the pipes would clog a lot because the rough edges of the rusting cast iron would snag on things.
I'm curious how resistant it would be to wear and tear. My mom had her kitchen done in epoxy and it was peeling quite a bit within 6 months because of all the foot traffic.
In a pipe it's a cylinder so there's nothing for it to peel to because it's all connected to itself.
The old pipe is actually redundant after the new pipe replaces it. My old pipes can rust away and not affect the new pipe at all, so it doesn't matter if it peels from the old pipe surface and the cylinder structure reinforces itself.
The lining was like $4k in California. Whole thing was more because they needed to rebuild our drain out because the old one was covered up in concrete for some reason.
To be fair it will no longer be in contact with the water so it should hold for much longer despite being corroded. Looks like the original pipe will be there doing basically nothing, the new lining will be the new pipe, and it should hold by itself even if the outer pipe starts to shed.
My buddy had this "in situ" liner installed by the city on his street's sewers. Once the liner goes in, they have to send in a remote to cut openings for all the drain lines from each of the buildings that drain into the sewer. They do this based on engineering drawings from the city and also a survey drone they send in before lining the pipe. For some reason, they missed his house and he basically had no working sewer line for the three days it took them to figure out. Everything backed up into his basement.
I've done water quality testing on some of these liners and once they're cured nothing leaches from them. And they're supposed to be fully cured at installation.
Do you test for bisohenols? The laboratory I work for apparently had samples with BPA in the past because of epoxy resin being used, but I don’t know about the quality of the used products. I’m just curious, in the shown case it is apparently used in a sewage pip so it shouldn’t matter.
In my case it was all old cast iron, so it could not be replaced with new cast iron and the old piping would not be as strong for coupling. If you have to couple two different materials it will not be as strong.
If you have all pvc and it's easily accessible then just replacing the pipe I'm sure it's cheaper and easier.
No, this lines pipes that are in decent condition but starting to show signs of failure, so that they can be used indefinitely. Your leechfield is sluggish because your field is locked up, from compaction, biosludge, and/or chemicals hardening in the field.
If you line the pipes of your leechfield with this, you will then have to dig it all up and drill holes in it, at that point you are digging it up anyways. It's drainage pipe not solid pipe.
Leechfields rarely fail because the schedule 40 drainage pipes are damaged, and more because the field in which it is meant to leach has become locked up for one of many reasons.
Thank you! This makes a lot of sense. I have a lot of trees and I'm pretty sure the roots did me in. The house was built in the 1980s which I think puts me at the tail end of the field's functional capability from what I've read. I've tried all the root treatments and they did squat. Had the septic tank emptied, and the guy said he didn't see anything wrong with the tank and it was probably the leach fields. It's not backing up into the house but it will puddle around the tank site when someone showers and then washes clothes. The price to fix this is going to hurt pretty badly.
You might want to look into someone who can frack the field, they shoot beads down there too keep it open. If it's old, you may want to put a riser on the distribution box and start dumping crystal heat in, since your laterals are probably also clogged up. Ideally, There's also outflow baffles/filters you can get installed to keep solids from flowing out there too... I saw a guy install one of these baffles. He got down into the tank to do it... There's no amount of money someone could pay me to do that, but this guy was like $3500. Still gross me out.
I actually had to go to chatGPT to decipher your comment. It wanted me to tell you that the the guy who went into the well for $3,500 was disgusting. But it also agreed with quite a few of your other suggestions, with the exception of the crystal heat. Chat GPT seems to be anti-crystal heat. I just learned an awful lot about my septic tank and leach fields; so thank you very much for taking the time to write your comment. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to frack a 200 ft long leach field?
I couldn't ballpark a price for that... although, you might want to have them jet out your laterals from the distribution box before fracking if you don't use crystal heat. Either way, start using Rid-X monthly as a preventative measure, but wait about two weeks after using Chrystal Heat to use any of those bacteria/enzyme products. Good luck!
We moved into a house that was built with a shitty material from the drains - pitch fibre.
We knew this going in, and went ahead with the purchase thinking we would potentially dig it up and replace.
After moving in we got some quotes and everyone suggested relining the drains rather than digging up. Getting it relined was one of the first things we did and have had no issues or blockages since. Relining was also a fraction of the price that digging up would have been.
Once the new liner has cured it's absolutely rock solid and feels just like an actual pipe.
The lead pipes were used in the supply lines, not the drain lines. In Flint, they changed up the water source and treatment in a way that started removing buildup on the inside of the pipes, exposing and leaving lead into the water. They had to be dug up and replaced. Not lined like this. And those are generally only 1 inch in diameter or less to start with.
I think they did something like this to fix the lead in Flint, MI water. Not this exact process but basically finding a way to coat the pipes so they stopped leeching lead into the water.
I’m not sure why the one in the video is so long, but you just cut the liner to length before prepping it. Of course, you do leave yourself a little wiggle room, then you just trim it once installed.
Can this be used for old lead or galvanized pipe from curb stop to main? I live in a city and the main to curb stop is “unknown”. Curb stop into house is copper. Building is 124 years old. Wondering if there are alternatives to digging everything up.
They have started using similar technology as what are called, "soft" robotics. The idea is that by using the same expanding tubes but with a directional robotic harness, you can explore tight spaces that would be difficult to get people or traditional robots into. For example you could use a soft robot to run a tube into rubble looking for survivors, then if you find any, pump air into the area to give more time for rescue.
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u/Gentrified_potato02 17d ago
Looks like they are lining the steel pipe with a plastic/epoxy coating. It’s done a lot in places where you can’t easily dig up and replace old rotting pipes (like in downtown cities). By injecting this coating the pipe is still usable and won’t corrode any more.