LA Plumbing Pros
Drains and blockages in Los Angeles
Kitchen sinks, tubs, toilets, floor drains, and the main line when the whole house backs up.
A blocked drain is the one plumbing problem everybody recognizes, and it is also the one most likely to be a symptom of something larger. Clearing it is usually quick. Working out whether it is going to happen again is the part that is worth paying for.
One fixture, or the whole house
One fixture backing up is usually local to that fixture, and the blockage is somewhere between it and the branch it joins. A kitchen sink is grease and food. A tub is hair and soap. A toilet is whatever went down it.
Several fixtures at once, or a whole house, points at the main line. So does a floor drain or a shower that fills when a toilet is flushed: the water is looking for the lowest opening it can find because the way out is blocked further along.
That difference decides what we bring and where we start, which is why it is the first thing we ask about.
Snaking, jetting, and which one a line can take
A cable opens a blocked line. It punches through the blockage and gets the water moving again, and on most household blockages that is the whole job.
Jetting is water at pressure. It scours the wall of the pipe instead of boring a hole through what is in it. On a line full of grease or scale it does a job a cable cannot. On an old line that has already lost its wall it can do damage, so it is not automatically the better answer and we will tell you when it is not.
Why an old drain line narrows
Cast iron drain line is in a great many Los Angeles houses and it does not block in the way people expect. The pipe closes up from the inside as the bore corrodes and scales, so the opening gets smaller every year until anything ordinary catches in it.
When that is what is happening, clearing it buys time without fixing it, and we will say so instead of selling you the same clearance every spring. What replacing it takes depends on where the line runs, which is the same question that decides the price of almost everything else under a house here.
When a blockage is a sewer line problem
Roots, a break, or a belly in the line out to the main all show up in the house as a blockage. If the main line backs up more than once, the next step is to look at it, not to clear it again. That is a different job and it is covered on sewer lines.
Questions people ask us
It cleared on its own. Do I still need someone?
Not necessarily. A one-off in a single fixture is usually just a blockage. A main line that has cleared itself twice is telling you something about the line.
Are drain chemicals a bad idea?
They are hard on older pipe and on the person who opens the trap afterwards, and they rarely reach a main line blockage at all. Tell us if you have used any so nobody gets a face full of it.
Do you clear drains in restaurants?
Yes. Grease lines and floor drains in a commercial kitchen are a different schedule and a different set of rules, and we will tell you what applies.
The rest of what we do
Tell us what is wrong.
Say what the problem is and where you are. We will tell you what we can do and what it takes.
Our work is covered for a year.
A photograph of a Los Angeles street of this kind. Not a photograph of a job by this company.