Champ Rooter & Drain

This is a sewer pipe. The dark part is what's left of the hole.

🔩 What came out: a cut section of the old cast iron line — corroded through from the outside, closed down with buildup on the inside. Failing from both directions at once is what turns a cleaning into a replacement.

❓ "Why not just rod it?" Because a cable clears what's blocking a pipe. It can't give the pipe back its wall. Once the metal has thinned and the bore has closed down, clearing it works — for a while — and then it closes again, usually sooner each time.

⛏️ Dug by hand. Down the side of the house, between the wall and the fence, there's no room for a machine. The trench follows the old line out by shovel.

⚫ New line in ABS, joined and laid on the grade dug for it. It doesn't rust and it doesn't scale the way old metal does.

🔓 Two cleanouts — a wye and riser partway along the run, and a two-way at the wall where the line leaves the house. Two-way means it opens toward the house and toward the street from one fitting.

👀 Worth knowing: a line that backs up, gets cleared, and backs up again on a shorter cycle each time is telling you about the pipe rather than the blockage.

📞 (209) 889-7868 · Free estimates

The cabinet floor under this kitchen sink had given way. So the base went back first, and the plumbing after it.

That order matters more than it sounds. The floor of a sink cabinet carries the disposal, the trap, the supply lines and whatever gets stored down there. Reconnecting all of it onto boards that are already soft just means doing the job twice.

New plywood floor and side panel went in first. Then the sink fl**ge — the joint everything else hangs from — seated properly rather than quickly.

The disposal went back on with the dishwasher hose connected to its inlet. Worth knowing if you ever have one fitted: that inlet comes sealed from the factory, and the plug has to be knocked out. If it isn't, the dishwasher has nowhere to drain and stands full of water.

New tailpiece and P-trap under the second bowl. The bend in a trap holds water, and that water is what keeps sewer gas out of your kitchen — which is why a trap is never something to leave out to save a fitting.

Then the supply side: hot and cold stops with braided lines, reconnected. Braided beats rubber here for the same reason it does behind a washing machine — it holds up where the old ones go brittle.

And then it gets run and watched, because a joint that's going to weep shows itself under water rather than under a torch.

Most of this job was never visible from the kitchen. The sink looks the same as it did. That's usually the part worth paying for.

Worth doing at your own place this week: open the cupboard under your kitchen sink and press the board at the back with your hand. If it gives at all, something above it has been dripping for a while — and the fix is both halves: stop the leak, then rebuild what the water ruined. Caught early it's a fitting. Left alone it's carpentry.

Licensed, bonded & insured · Lic #1090721
📞 (209) 889-7868 · Free estimates

The worst time for a leak is when nobody's home — and five minutes before you walk out the door changes what you come back to.

Here's the difference. A supply line that fails while you're in the house gets noticed in minutes. The same failure with the house empty runs for as long as you're gone. Four days away is roughly five thousand minutes of water. That gap is why one of these ends with a mop and the other ends with a contractor, and it's decided before you lock up.

Two minutes, every trip: the washing machine. Reach behind it and close both valves. Burst hoses are the classic empty-house flood — and with those valves shut, the hose can give way and no water follows it.

A week or more: close the main. Shut the main valve for the house, then open a tap for a moment to drop the pressure in the lines. Nothing in the walls is holding pressure while you're away.

One thing to know before you rely on that. Find out now whether your main shutoff actually turns — not on the morning you're leaving with bags by the door. If the handle is stiff, or it starts weeping when you move it, leave it alone and close the washer valves instead, then get it dealt with before the next trip. Turning every valve in the house once a year is what keeps this a non-event.

The water heater. Most gas heaters have a vacation setting on the dial, often marked VAC, which keeps the tank warm enough without heating water nobody's using. If yours doesn't have one, turning the dial to its lowest does the same job. On an electric heater, leave it alone unless you're comfortable working at the breaker.

Then walk the house once. Look under both sinks, around the base of the water heater, and at the ceiling below an upstairs bathroom. You're looking for damp, a stain, or a crusty white ring at a fitting — the signs that something is already seeping. Much better to find that with your bags still packed than when you get back.

If it's a winter trip, take the hose off the outside tap before you go. A hose left connected through a freeze is what splits the pipe inside the wall — and you won't be there to notice when it thaws.

And if you do come home to it: close the main before anything else, even if you can't see where the water came from. Then call. The sooner it's dry, the less of it there is to repair.

Licensed, bonded & insured · Lic #1090721
📞 (209) 889-7868 · Free estimates

Most water heaters are set hotter than they need to be, usually because nobody has touched the dial since the house was built. It's worth checking this weekend — and it's a safety question before it's a money one.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends 120°F for a home water heater. Their published figures are the reason: at 140°F, water can cause a serious burn in seconds. At 120°F, it takes minutes. That gap matters most for the people slowest to get out of the way — small children, older adults, anyone who can't move quickly in a shower.

How to check what you've actually got. Run the hot tap nearest the heater for two or three minutes, fill a cup, and put a cooking thermometer in it. That reading is what's arriving at your fixtures. Don't rely on the dial: plenty are marked "warm / hot / very hot" rather than in degrees, and they aren't always accurate even when they are numbered.

Where the control is. On a gas heater it's a dial on the gas valve down near the floor — easy to reach and adjust. On an electric heater, the thermostats sit behind screwed access panels, and behind those panels are live terminals. The breaker goes off before anything comes off. If you're not certain about that, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to have someone else do.

Don't go too far the other way, either. Lower isn't simply better — turn it far enough down and you trade a scald risk for a bacteria one, which is exactly why 120°F is the number that keeps getting recommended rather than 100. Set it, then live with it for a week before deciding it's wrong. And if you were running it hot for the dishwasher's sake, most modern machines heat their own water.

What you get for it, beyond the safety: a tank holds its temperature all day whether you use it or not, so the hotter it's held, the more it quietly loses to the garage. Hotter water also drops its minerals faster, so a cooler tank builds scale more slowly — and in water as hard as ours, that's worth having.

While you're down there, one related thing: sediment on the tank floor makes the burner work through a layer of grit. Flushing once a year helps. But an old tank that's never been flushed is one to have looked at rather than experimented on — stirring up years of sediment can be what finishes it.

And call us if it's scalding even turned down. A tank running hotter than its setting, or swinging hot and cold through a shower, usually has a thermostat or a mixing valve at fault rather than a dial. Same for no hot water, or hot water that runs short much sooner than it used to — that one is often sediment.

Licensed, bonded & insured · Lic #1090721
📞 (209) 889-7868 · Free estimates