When the old pipe is worn out
Orangeburg is the pipe to worry about. It was made of wood pulp and pitch, laid in American houses from about 1860 to 1970 and most popular in the 1950s and 60s, and Fairfax County’s engineers note that it can blister, peel in layers and eventually collapse. The Census puts the median house in Granite City at 1958 and in Alton at 1953, right inside that window.
Clay lasts longer but gives out at the joints, where roots get in and the line starts to sag. When the camera shows the same trouble every few feet, replacing the run is cheaper over the next twenty years than paying for spot repairs one at a time.
How the new line goes in
We dig, take out the old pipe, and lay new pipe on a gravel bed with a steady fall toward the main. Illinois sets the minimum grade for drain pipe bigger than 3 inches and smaller than 8 at one-eighth of an inch per foot, and wants a full-size clean-out within five feet of the foundation, so the next camera or jetter has a way in. Then the line is camera-checked, backfilled, compacted, and the dig is cleaned up.
Paul Mueller had his whole line replaced by our crew:
Grateful for their promptness and hard work to replace my whole sewer line.
