Sewer Jetting in Parke County and the Wabash Valley

Jetting versus running a cable

A drain cable, sometimes called a snake or an auger, is a rotating steel spring that bores through an obstruction. It works, in the narrow sense that water starts moving again. What it leaves behind is a pipe whose walls are still coated with everything that caused the blockage, now with a hole through the middle.

Jetting is different. A high-pressure hose with a reverse-facing nozzle head is fed down the line. The jets pull the hose forward while blasting water backward against the pipe wall, cutting grease, sludge and soft root mass off the sides and flushing it back toward the access point. When the hose comes out, the pipe is at close to its original inside diameter rather than at the diameter of the hole the cable made.

Practically: cabling a grease-fouled kitchen line buys you a few months. Jetting the same line buys you a few years. On a root-intruded lateral, a cable shears the roots at the pipe wall and they regrow from the same intrusion point; jetting scours further and removes more of the mass, though it does not fix the crack that let the roots in.

When jetting is the right call

• The line has backed up more than once. Repeat blockages in the same run mean the pipe wall is coated, not that something got stuck once.
• Grease. Restaurant lines, church kitchens, any commercial food operation. Grease coats and hardens, and only water pressure takes it back off.
• Roots. Older clay and cast lines out in the county are prone to root intrusion at the joints, especially on properties with mature trees over the run.
• Sludge in a long, flat run. Common on rural laterals with a shallow fall between the house and the tank.
• Before a camera inspection. You cannot see the condition of a pipe wall through a coating of grease.

What jetting will not fix: a collapsed pipe, a bellied section holding water, or a break. Water pressure cannot repair a structural problem. If we jet a line and it blocks again quickly in the same spot, that is the signal, and we will say so instead of selling you a second jetting.

What we need on your end

An access point. A cleanout is ideal. If there is no cleanout, we can often work from a pulled toilet or through the septic tank inlet, but access is the first thing we will ask about on the phone. On a septic system, we also want to know when the tank was last pumped, because a full tank can present exactly like a blocked line and pumping it may be the entire fix.

Jetting versus cabling, side by side

Why call us for it

Because we are already the ones with the tank truck. On a rural property the line, the tank and the field are one system, and the person clearing your line should be able to look at all three. Plenty of jetting calls out here end with the honest answer being "your line is fine, your tank is full," which we can then handle on the same visit.

And because the phone gets answered. A line that lets go on a Sunday afternoon in Parke County is not a Monday morning problem, and (765) 562-9033 rings whether it is a Tuesday or a holiday.