Drain Cleaning and Clogged Drain Service in Des Plaines

The drains we are called out for

Kitchen sinks are the most common call in older Chicagoland houses. Cooking grease leaves the sink as a warm liquid, cools in the horizontal run under the floor and hardens against the pipe wall. Layer by layer the opening narrows until the sink drains at a trickle. A cable will punch a hole through that build-up and get the sink working again, but water jetting is what actually scours the grease off the pipe wall and buys you years instead of months.

Laundry standpipes clog for a different reason. Lint from a washing machine binds with detergent and soap scum and packs into the trap and the branch line, and because a washer dumps a large volume of water in a short burst, a partly restricted standpipe overflows onto the floor long before it fully blocks. If your washer has started backing up onto the laundry-room floor, the line is already most of the way closed.

Tubs and lavatory sinks are usually hair and soap in the trap or the branch. Toilets that gurgle when the tub drains, or a basement floor drain that backs up when the washer runs, are a different story — that pattern means the restriction is downstream of several fixtures, in the building drain or the main line out to the sewer.

Basement floor drains and main-line backups get priority, because everything in the house drains through that pipe. When the main is blocked, running any fixture upstairs pushes water out at the lowest opening in the building, which is almost always the floor drain next to the furnace or water heater.

Cabling, jetting and camera inspection

Cabling — what most people still call rodding or snaking — sends a rotating steel cable down the line with a cutting head on the end. It is the right first move for a solid obstruction: a hair mass, a wad of wipes, a root ball in a main line. It reopens the pipe quickly and it works in lines that are too small or too fragile for high-pressure water.

Water jetting uses a high-pressure hose and a nozzle that fires water backward against the pipe wall as it travels. It does not just make a hole; it strips grease, soap, sludge and scale off the full circumference and flushes the debris out. For a kitchen line that keeps closing up, a restaurant grease line, or a main that has silted in, jetting is the difference between clearing a clog and cleaning a pipe.

A camera inspection is worth doing whenever a line has backed up more than once, whenever the house is old enough to have a clay lateral, or before you spend money on a repair. The camera shows whether you are looking at roots at a joint, a belly holding standing water, an offset where two sections have shifted, or a collapsed section — four problems that feel identical from the sink and cost very different amounts to fix.

Tree roots are the reason a lot of Chicagoland mains fail. Older laterals were laid in short clay sections with mortared joints, and every joint leaks a little moisture into the soil. Parkway maples, elms and willows follow that moisture in through the joint and keep growing inside the pipe. Cutting them out restores flow, but roots return on their own schedule — usually every year or two — which is when it is worth looking at the pipe itself rather than the roots.

What happens on the visit

We start by asking which fixtures are affected and in what order, because that narrows the location of the blockage before anyone opens a cleanout. One slow sink is a branch problem. Several fixtures on the lowest level is a building-drain or main-line problem.

We work from the nearest suitable cleanout wherever one exists, protect the floors and surrounding cabinetry, and pull the trap or remove the toilet only when there is no better access. After the line is open we run water through it long enough to confirm it drains at full volume, not just that the standing water disappeared.

Before we leave you get a plain explanation of what came out of the pipe and what we would recommend next — nothing, a jetting on the kitchen line, or a camera run on the main. If the camera shows a broken or root-filled lateral, that moves into sewer repair territory and we walk you through the options rather than selling you a cleaning every spring.