Why I usually prefer to dig

A trench sewer is my preferred method most of the time. The reason is simple: in my experience, most sewer repairs are 20 feet or less. If you only have a short run, by the time you dig down just to set up the equipment to burst a pipe, you could have replaced the whole thing with an open trench. Personally, as a company, we like to dig.

For a standard sewer we use schedule 40 PVC pipe, which is a great, heavy duty pipe. The thing people should know is that there is cheap pipe and there is good pipe. The plastic pipe from the home center is often foam core, a layer of plastic, a layer of PVC foam, then another layer of plastic. It is up to code for drains and fine to use. We use solid core PVC instead, which costs more but is a superior pipe, and roots cannot follow water through it the way they can with other materials.

When trenchless actually makes sense

Open-cut has a limit. Once you get below about 13 or 14 feet deep, you are into a different level of excavation, bigger trench boxes, bigger machines, and it gets dangerous, especially in a yard where you cannot bench or shelve the walls and it has to be a single deep trench. And the dirt is no joke. The soil out of a 15 foot hole expands to something like 25 feet of dirt once it is out of the ground. It is a lot.

So if we are looking at a really deep excavation, and the pipe is not bellied, pipe bursting becomes absolutely my preferred method. It also shines in specific spots where you do not want to tear up the surface:

• Under a brand new driveway or nice concrete
• Under a hundred-plus-year-old tree, we did one to save the tree
• Under an inground pool, I have done one indoors and we watched for the vibrations like the cup scene in Titanic, and it worked perfectly
• Under roadways, or in-floor heated and snow-melt concrete

Why pipe bursting beats relining, in my opinion

There are two trenchless technologies people talk about, pipe bursting and relining, and in my opinion bursting is superior. Here is the short version of how bursting works. We use schedule 80 pipe, which is twice the wall thickness of schedule 40, made out of polyethylene (HDPE). If you have ever seen yellow gas lines or well casing, that is the material, a really hard, durable plastic. In 4 inch schedule 80 it is one of the toughest materials I have ever worked with. We put a big bullet head on the end, run a chain through the old pipe, and the head bursts the old pipe out of the way while pulling the new pipe through behind it. It is a fantastic system. It can be expensive and you need two holes to do it, but for the right job it is incredible.

Relining is different. It uses a fiber mesh resin or epoxy system inside the old pipe, sometimes a sock, sometimes UV cured, sometimes cured in place with steam and hot water. There are companies out there that do well with it, and that is great for them. I am just not interested in it as a company. I do not like questionable things, and I want to deliver exactly what we promise. If there is not a solution I am fully confident offering, I would rather refer you elsewhere than put my name on it. We would not even sub it out. If that is how I feel, then that is the right answer for our company.

The honest bottom line

Trenchless is a tool in the tool belt, not a magic wand, and it gets better every year. But traditional sewer repair almost always involves some digging, so for now we are digging on most jobs. Relining is generally aimed at the long pulls, 20, 40, 60 feet. If your run is short, trenching is usually the smarter, more straightforward fix. The right call comes down to depth, length, what is on the surface, and whether the pipe is bellied. You can see the full scope of our work on our sewer line replacement page, and we cover relining methods honestly on our trenchless liner page.