Finding and Fixing Septic Line Cracks

LESLIE: Alright. We’ve got Alex from Illinois on the line with a plumbing question. What can we do for you?

ALEX: I’ve got a septic issue. From the house to the tank, I think the line may be cracked in the middle of it. But the problem is my house is on a slab. And as far as I know, the pipes are in the slab.

TOM: What I would do is two things. First of all, you need to have a drain-camera inspection done to confirm what you’re dealing with. So, there is a drain camera that looks kind of like a snake. And it can go 50, 100, 200 feet in the line and can actually give you a pretty decent picture of what’s going on there.

And so, let’s assume that you confirm that somewhere under that slab, there’s a crack in the pipe. There’s a way to insert a liner into that pipe. It’s kind of like a fiberglass sock, if that makes sense, that gets inserted into the pipe and then filled up with water to kind of press it against the side and the water is released. And it basically kind of creates a pipe inside of a pipe and uses the old pipe as sort of the structure. But it will stop things from kind of permanently getting in there. Sometimes when you have a crack in a pipe, you get roots that form in there that will clog things up and that kind of stuff. Or you get a rough edge where waste gets trapped. So with this sort of fiberglass sock in there, that solves that.

So that’s the way you repair a pipe that goes under something critical, like your house or your driveway or around your pool or something of that nature. But those are the two things you need.

Now you’re going to have to do some work here to figure out where – what the company is best to work with on that. But I know that some of the big plumbing companies that do drain-cleaning will have this technology. But the first thing is figure out what you’re dealing with, determine if you’ve got a crack or not or maybe it’s something simpler to fix, OK?

ALEX: I appreciate it very much.

TOM: Alright. Good luck with that project. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.