Two machines get sold as the same service. They are not. A cable is a rotating steel snake with a cutting or retrieving head on the end, and what it does is punch a hole through whatever is in the way so the line drains again. It does not clean the pipe wall. A jetter sends high pressure water through a nozzle with rear-facing jets that propel it up the line, then scours the full circumference of the pipe on the way back toward the access point.
The short version: a cable buys you weeks, a jetter buys you years, and on the wrong pipe a jetter buys you a collapse. Which is why the order matters. On any line where we do not already know the material and condition, the camera goes in first and the jetter goes in second, with the camera's findings in hand. Plenty of operators do it the other way around.
What a cable does, and what it is for
Cable sizing is about the pipe, not the clog. A quarter inch to three eighths inch cable runs the inch and a quarter to two inch fixture arms and small branches. A half inch to five eighths inch cable runs three and four inch building drains and mains. Heavier sectional cable is for long mains and heavy roots, where you need torque at the far end rather than convenience at the near end. Drum machines are easier to get into a house. Sectional machines deliver more torque down a long run.
A cable is the right call for a single fixture stoppage, for a foreign object, and any time the job is to retrieve something rather than destroy it. It is also the right call when you want the line open now and a decision about the pipe later. What it will not do is restore diameter. If the pipe is coated in grease or scale, the cable drills a passage through the coating and leaves the coating where it was. The line drains, the customer is happy, and the same call comes back.
What a jetter does, and the part most pages get wrong
Pressure cuts. Flow cleans and carries. That distinction is the whole craft and it is the thing to ask about when someone quotes you jetting. A small cart machine running four gallons a minute at high pressure will cut a grease plug in half, and then leave the pieces sitting in a four inch main because there is not enough water moving to carry them out. A machine moving eight or nine gallons a minute, or a truck mounted unit moving considerably more, transports the debris to the cleanout instead of relocating it thirty feet downstream. Matching flow to pipe diameter is the job.
Nozzle choice is the other half. The nozzle decides whether the water is drilling, sweeping, or cutting, and the wrong one either does nothing or does damage.
| Nozzle | What it does | Used on |
|---|---|---|
| Penetrating | One forward jet plus rear thrust jets; drills a passage | A hard plug or ice, to open a path before cleaning |
| Flushing, rear facing | Three to six rear jets at shallow angles; sweeps the wall and carries debris back | The workhorse for wall cleaning and debris transport |
| Rotating | Spins the jet pattern across the full circumference | Grease, soap, soft scale |
| Chain flail | A mechanical cutting head driven by the water | Roots, hard scale, tuberculation. Never in thin wall or compromised pipe |
| Root cutting | High angle rear jets sized to cut root mass at the joint | Root intrusion at joints, after the line has been assessed |
What the camera shows, defect by defect
A camera inspection is not a formality before a sale. Each defect looks different on the screen, and each one points at a different repair. You should be watching the screen with us, and you should be able to name what you are looking at by the end of the run.
- Belly, or sag. The picture goes underwater and comes back out. Standing water that does not drain as the camera advances. The reel counter tells you where it is and the sonde tells you how deep. Nothing you clean the pipe with fixes a belly.
- Offset joint. A visible ledge or step at a joint, usually with a shadow and debris caught on the lip. It is measured as a percentage of the pipe diameter, and past a certain point it rules out lining.
- Root intrusion. Fine hair-like masses entering at a joint or crack, usually at the top or sides where the seal failed. It shows up as a curtain the camera has to push through.
- Scale and tuberculation. In cast iron, nodular rust growth with a rough orange brown surface, reducing diameter. In hard water, hard white grey calcium carbonate deposits, worst on the drain side of dishwashers and laundry.
- Orangeburg. The pipe has gone oval or blistered and the wall looks layered and delaminated, like wet cardboard.
- Grease. A smooth off white or tan coating narrowing the pipe, often with a scalloped surface.
When jetting can damage a pipe
Saying jetting is always safe is easier than saying this, and it is not true. There are five conditions where a jetter is the wrong tool and one of them is common enough here to matter.
Orangeburg, the bituminized wood fiber pipe made from the mid 1940s to the early 1970s, delaminates and collapses. Never jet it. Heavily corroded cast iron can be a shell already thinned from the inside, and the jet blows through the wall. Clay with open joints is worse than it looks: the water washes bedding material out through the joints, which creates voids, which produces settlement and a new offset a year later. Thin wall or already cracked PVC and ABS propagate the crack, because pressure enters it. And on any line with a known offset, the nozzle catches the lip and directs the jet into the soil instead of down the pipe.
The rule we work to is simple. Camera before jetting on any line of unknown material or condition, and jet with the findings in hand.
Grease, and the hard water twist nobody local writes about
Kitchen lines do not clog because grease cools. They clog because of saponification. Fats and oils go down warm and liquid and react with the alkaline soaps and detergents already in the drain to form insoluble metallic soaps that stick to the pipe wall and build up. The soaps formed are calcium and magnesium salts of fatty acids. The more calcium and magnesium in the water, the more of that hard, adherent deposit forms.
The City of St. George's Water Distribution Division tells residents to set water softeners to 18 grains per gallon, with a maximum of 22. That is the utility's own number, not a softener vendor's. At that hardness, a kitchen line here accumulates a harder and more tenacious deposit than the same household would produce in a soft water city. It is the same chemistry that scales a water heater, working on the drain side.
For commercial kitchens the rules are written down. Under the City's pretreatment program, every kitchen fixture except hand washing sinks and ice machines must connect to grease waste lines flowing into an interceptor, and before a business can be occupied and licensed the fixtures must pass a dye test conducted by the Pretreatment Department after the interceptor leak test is approved. That is a hard gate on an opening date, and it is worth knowing before the plumbing is roughed in rather than after.
Roots, and what actually kills them
Roots follow moisture and nutrients. A sewer lateral leaks water vapor and nitrogen at every joint, crack and connection, and in a desert there is nowhere else to find that combination. That is why roots in this market are aggressive out of proportion to the tree canopy overhead. They enter through failed joint seals and hairline cracks, then thicken inside the pipe until they break it open from the inside.
Copper sulfate crystals are sold for this and are close to useless as used. They kill only the root tissue they physically touch, they do not clear the mass, they do not stop regrowth, and they travel along the bottom of the pipe, which is the one place the roots are not. Roots hang from the crown and the sides above the flow line. The products that work are the foaming dichlobenil herbicides registered with the EPA, sold as RootX and Razorooter II, because the foam expands to fill the pipe and contacts the roots where they actually are, then leaves a residual on the wall that slows regrowth.
The order matters. Remove the root mass mechanically first, with a cutter on a cable or a root nozzle on a jetter, then foam the cleaned wall, then re-treat on a cycle. Foaming a pipe still packed with roots wastes the product. And none of it is a repair. Chemicals manage roots. They do not fix the crack or the offset joint that let the roots in, and in this market that defect is usually the ground moving, not the pipe failing.
How often, and when to stop cleaning and start fixing
Cleaning intervals are a scheduling judgment, not a law, and ours are shorter than the national advice for two reasons: the hardness above, and the soil movement that produces bellies and offsets in pipe that is otherwise in perfect condition. A main with a known root history gets jetted and treated on a regular cycle. A main with a belly gets cleaned on a cycle too, because the belly will keep collecting solids no matter how well the line was cleaned last time. A main with no known defects gets a camera every few years, and a kitchen line on this water gets jetted sooner than you would expect.
There is a point where maintenance is just rent. If the camera shows standing water at the same footage every visit, you are paying to clean a grade problem. That is a dig, a re-bed and a re-grade, and no amount of cleaning or lining changes it. We would rather tell you that on the second visit than the sixth.
What we’d do at your house
We camera the line before we jet it, and you watch the screen with us.
If the pipe is Orangeburg, badly corroded cast iron, or already offset, we will tell you the jetter is the wrong tool and why.
For a single stopped fixture we cable it, because that is the right tool and it costs you less.
On a kitchen line we will show you the deposit on camera and connect it to what your water is doing to the rest of the house.
On roots we cut first and treat second, and we tell you plainly that treatment is management, not repair.
If the camera shows a belly, we say so and quote the excavation. We will not sell you a liner for a sag.
Sources
What this page says comes from the documents below, read in full. It describes them. It is not legal advice. Confirm with your association, your city, or an attorney before you act.
- Cabling versus jetting, cable sizing, nozzle types, and the pressure versus flow distinction 01-plumbing-corpus.md §3.1
- Camera inspection defect signatures 01-plumbing-corpus.md §3.2
- Conditions where jetting damages pipe 01-plumbing-corpus.md §3.3
- Saponification, and calcium and magnesium salts of fatty acids in hard water 01-plumbing-corpus.md §3.4
- City of St. George Water Distribution Division softener guidance, 18 gpg with a maximum of 22 05-environment-water-geology-corpus.md §1.1; playbook.txt §4
- St. George pretreatment program: grease waste lines, interceptors, and the dye test before occupancy and business licensing 01-plumbing-corpus.md §3.4
- Root intrusion mechanism in an arid climate; copper sulfate versus foaming dichlobenil products; treatment protocol 01-plumbing-corpus.md §3.5
- Preventive maintenance intervals and the belly problem 01-plumbing-corpus.md §3.6; §4.1
- Soil movement as the cause of offsets and bellies in otherwise sound pipe 01-plumbing-corpus.md §4.2; 05-environment-water-geology-corpus.md §2.10
- Voice rules: declarative sentences, numbers over adjectives, say what you will not do 08-trust-language-bank.md §1, §4, §12