Snaking vs Hydro Jetting: Which Drain Cleaning Should You Choose?
It’s important that your home’s water pipes work well at all times. These pipes are responsible for moving waste and dirty water away from your home. Unfortunately, when pipes get blocked, they can’t do their jobs. This has serious consequences for a residential plumbing system. If your home is experiencing problems with clogged pipes, you have two options: hydro-jet cleaning or snaking.
What Is Hydro-jet Cleaning?
Hydro-jetting, also referred to as water-jetting, is a specialized cleaning solution for drain and sewer pipes. It uses a high-pressure hose that has a special nozzle affixed on the end. The hose itself connects to a machine that directs pressurized water through the nozzle to clean and clear out congested sewer pipes.
Is Hydro-jetting Recommended for All Drain Clogs?
Some pipes aren’t strong enough to handle the force of hydro-jetting. In these cases, using a drain snake is better. Drain snake service uses a cable machine to clear clogs and is an affordable option. Hydro-jetting is best for serious clogs such as when there are tree roots in the sewer line or there is a massive clog that won’t respond to other methods.
Benefits of Hydro-jetting Service
Blocked sewer lines put the drains inside your home at risk of backing up and overflowing. Like it or not, the sewer pipes on your property are your responsibility to maintain. The easiest and most effective way to do this is to use hydro-jetting to clear serious clogs. The reason this method is popular and so effective is that it’s able to cut through virtually anything including wood, dried concrete, grease clinging to pipes, and those pesky tree roots. The pressurized water is powerful enough to pulverize nearly any material and wash it away and out of the pipe. Another benefit of hydro-jetting is that it cleans pipes thoroughly, leaving the pipes crystal clear and ready to stave off future clogs.
Benefits of the Drain Snake
The drain snake is a great option for small clogs that haven’t made it past the trap and deep into the line. It’s also a good option for homeowners who want to try to clear a clog before calling for professional drain cleaning services. Drain snakes, or hand augers, are available at home improvement stores and are a cost-effective, easy-to-use option for the average person.
Top Tips For Best Services in Hydro Jetting
Be it your residence or your commercial complex, you inevitably have a complex series of drain pipes. As the name tells, these pipes carry dirty water and other waste materials that increase the chance of getting these pipes clogged. Such situation can lead to severe situations that your residence or commercial property cannot tolerate. Obviously, it requires the best services to remove the wastes and keep the pipe clear and free-flowing.
Though you do not have any practical idea for such a service, you cannot find it difficult to understand that cleaning the clogged drain can never be an easy task. It is here that you start realizing the significance of the services for Hydro Jetting Seattle.
What is Hydro Jetting?
As far as the idea behind Hydro Jetting is concerned, you can take it as a technology that use a high-pressure flow of water to remove the waste that gets clogged in the drain pipes preventing it to carrying waste away from your home. The water is blown into the pipes using a machine that removes everything that gets clogged in the drain. Remember, it is the latest technique that has eased the process of drain cleaning everywhere in Seattle and rest of the USA. Since it has been tried and tested by hundreds of satisfied customers, therefore you may not have any doubts in the utilities of the technique.
Since the technology used in Hydro Jetting is yet to reach the common plumbing agencies, therefore the availability of the service is not that satisfying at the moment. Still, you must keep a few tips in your mind. Following are some of them:
Hire an agency for Hydro Jetting Seattle on personal recommendations. Please ensure that these recommendations can make your task easier as you do not need to crosscheck the credibility of the service providers.
Reasons to choose Hydro Jetting Sewer and Drain Pipe Cleaning
Slow draining water in the kitchen sink, frequent clogs in the toilet, stinky smells in the sinks, and unexplained gurgling sounds are all signs of a drainage system that need to be cleaned. Ignoring these problems can be very expensive and potentially hazardous to the family’s health so the owner will need to address these issues by hiring a professional plumbing company to take on this job. Though there are a number of different methods that can be used to clean a homes drains, some are considered to be better than others. Therefore, it is important for homeowners to do their homework prior to making a decision. Choosing the best drain process in the industry does not have to be difficult since homeowners have the option of using Hydro Jetting Sewer and Drain Pipe cleaning.
Cutting-Edge Technology
As technology advances, virtually every industry is experiencing changes that can completely revolutionize how things are being done. In fact, the old standards may be left light years behind as the new industry standards become the most prominent. In relation to hydro-jetting and its present role in sewer pipe cleaning, this method is not only effective, but it is also cutting edge technology. Therefore, using augers, plumbing snakes, rooter machines, and mechanical rodding is quickly become older technology, while hydro jetting pipe cleaning is quickly becoming the ultimate solution. This is because hydro jetting uses a huge amount of force to get rid of large debris, stuck tree roots, and grease accumulation that is stuck in sewer walls.
Eliminates Emergency Drain Problems
Even though a homeowner and their family may see all of the signs of needing drain cleaning services very clearly, they may not address these problems until they escalate. Meaning the owner may not contact a professional plumber until it is an emergency. Fortunately, when a homeowner contacts a plumber that has the hydro jetting equipment, the problems that they experience can be taken care of right away. In fact, it does not matter if these emergencies are discovered in a home, office or a restaurant, it is portable electric technology that can be transported wherever it is needed.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HYDRO JETTING & SNAKING
When it comes to keeping your drains unclogged and your pipes clean, there are several options to choose from. Plumbers often use one of two solutions for clogs and pipe cleaning: plumbing snakes or hydro jetting. While plumbing snakes, or plumbing augers, are a more classic approach, hydro jetting offers an innovative solution for most pipe problems.
So what’s best for your situation? That depends on the problem! When a plunger just doesn’t cut it, you need something with a little more force to clear out a clog. That is when hydro jetting and snaking come into play. Each technique is useful for different types of clogs, so you want to make sure you have a qualified plumber handling your drain clog!
When Snaking Is Beneficial
Snaking a clogged drain is done with an auger, which looks like a long steel cable with a coil at the end of it. A plumber will insert the cable into the sewer line, using the coil at the end to break through any obstructions. This will clear up the gunk in your pipes and remove any clogs.
What are the main perks of this option?
Tried and true method – You know it works and does a solid job on most clogs because plumbers have been using it for decades.
Easy on the pipes – It is an undisruptive procedure for your pipes (but not the clogs), meaning if you have fragile pipes, this is a great option.
Tackles minor clogs easily – When there is just a minor clog to tackle, snaking can easily get the job done and give you back your drain.
Exposes plumbing dangers – Since a snake uses pressure to break through clogs, it can alert you to issues like tree roots in your pipes.
The bottom line is that cabling a pipeline with an auger is a proven method that can eliminate most basic clogs. However, there are downsides to this method as well. In most cases, snaking is just a temporary solution to pipe buildups, which means more clogs in the future. If you really want to eliminate the risk of clogs, you may want to go with a more powerful, innovative option.
Choosing The Right Jetter, GPM or PSI?
Pressure Cuts into blockages:
“Thinner” high-pressure waterjet streams from a good jetting nozzle will have the most ‘cutting’ power if the PSI is adequate; experience has shown that a 3500-4000psi jetter with 6 or more GPM and the right Warthog nozzle/tool WILL cut out root masses, chop up hard grease, and carve out hard settled dirt. We’ve shipped dozens of Jetters that do 9-gpm/4000psi for cutting out this kind of crud from 3″-8” drains and sewers. Pressure cuts is also why 4000psi trailer-mounted jetters at 18-gpm are so common with contractors who get paid to cut out blockages. This is also why the little 1500psi electric-powered units don’t cut out much at all.
GPM (‘Volume’) flushes out debris:
“Wider” waterjet streams shooting out of a jetting nozzle will have the most ‘flushing’ action, and more volume is also more impact in the cleaning. If the GPM is adequate the sheer volume of water will push and carry debris. If you want to move larger rock/bricks/grease-logs, etc., you’ll need more GPM. This is why City & County crews clean 8-12” pipe with 40-60gpm, and larger pipelines with 80+gpm trucks. This is also why little 2gpm electric-jetters don’t flush out much debris. The GPM you will need depends greatly on the pipe diameter being cleaned and whether or not you really are required to flush/scour the line clean, or if you just need to penetrate a blockage to restore flow.
Example story from the field:
A story from a contractor that was hired by a City to video-inspect an 8” pipe: When he got there, the City crew had been working for 2 hours trying to clear roots from the line with their big 65gpm/2000psi jetting truck. The contractor had a 6-gpm/4000psi jetter in his van along with his TV System and the City let him take a crack at the roots. Using a “Warthog” Slow-Rotating Cutter-Nozzle, the contractor cleared the roots and then finished the video inspection. Notice that he got done with a 20-horsepower unit what the City could not do with a 100-horsepower unit. Why? Because (a) he had the right tools and (b) PRESSURE CUTS. The contractor said in the article “you should have seen their faces!” In contrast, it is important to also realize that if we were talking about clearing rocks and debris (instead of cutting roots) then the story would be the opposite; the 65-gpm truck would run circles around the 6-gpm jetter, because VOLUME FLUSHES.
