Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about your sewer lines. There are things to know if you have a sewer line backup, and it’d be good to know them before you have a backup.
How Will a Sewer Line Cleanout Help?
Number one is that for many houses (not all houses but all houses since about 1970) it was code that they installed a set of sewer line cleanouts on your sewer line. These will be in the front of your house, or sometimes they can be off the side of your house.
Why it’s good to know where those are: Let us say, all of a sudden, your sewer backs up and you have a mess inside your house. Nothing’s draining. What you can do is you can find those cleanouts. If you take off one of the caps and if the backup is from the cleanout toward the street, you can take that cap off. Basically, it relieves the pressure, and water will come out the top of that cleanout. And yes, you’ll need to call a plumber and have them come out for a sewer line repair. But you can get by, a little bit, where it’s not quite as big of an emergency as it would be if you didn’t have cleanouts.
How to Tell If You Have a Sewer Line Cleanout
Usually, there are two white caps. They could be rubber caps or they could be black caps. If you have an old galvanized line, it might be two metal caps. Sometimes there’s only one, but there should be two.
Now, when they installed sewer lines in some older houses, they didn’t install them with cleanouts. It’s always good to have them. One thing that Rocketman Plumbing does recommend is we can go out to your house, run our camera, spot exactly where your sewer line is, and inspect the condition of your sewer line. We can also pick a good spot to dig out and at least put in a set of cleanouts so when you have an emergency, it’s not quite as big of an emergency as if you didn’t have those.
If you notice sewer line problems and think installing a cleanout is what you need, please call Rocketman Plumbing at (505) 243-1227. We’ll come out, and we’ll take care of it for you.