Commercial Pipe Lining

What commercial pipe is, and why it fails faster

Commercial drainage is bigger, busier and more varied than a house sewer. A restaurant row runs four- and six-inch grease-laden lines to an interceptor and then to the street. An apartment complex or hotel has vertical cast iron stacks four to ten stories tall, horizontal collectors in the slab or the garage ceiling, and a private main that may run hundreds of feet under landscaping and parking before it reaches the public sewer. A retail center has roof drains, parking-lot catch basins and a storm system running beneath the lot. A homeowners association often owns the mains under its private streets outright. All of it was built in the same decades as the houses around it, with the same clay, cast iron, concrete and Orangeburg, and it fails the same ways, only faster: grease coats and narrows restaurant lines, hydrogen sulfide from a busy sewer eats the crown of cast iron, and a line that takes the flow of two hundred units moves more water through every open joint than any house ever will.

Lining a building without closing it

The reason trenchless took over commercial sewer work is that it can be done in pieces. A building is surveyed reach by reach with a camera, the defects are mapped, and the lining is sequenced so that any one section is out of service for a night or a few hours rather than for a week. Vertical stacks are lined from the roof or the top floor downward through an access at each level, with the branch connections to each unit reinstated by a robotic cutter from inside the stack. Horizontal lines under a slab are lined from a cleanout or a pulled fixture. Shared mains under landscaping and parking are lined from manholes or small pits at the ends of each reach, with a bypass pump carrying flow around the section being cured. The parking lot stays open, the dining room stays open, and nobody moves out.

Grease lines, stacks and the things that are different

Restaurant lines have to be cleaned to bare wall before a liner will bond, and that means hydro jetting with the right nozzle, sometimes more than once, with the grease captured rather than pushed downstream. Cast iron stacks have to be descaled, and the liner has to be a product rated for vertical installation. Small-diameter branch lines, the two-inch runs from a kitchen or a bathroom group, are often better served by a sprayed or brush-applied epoxy coating than by a full tube. Storm lines under a lot have to be lined around weather, with the catch basins and the outfall managed, and corrugated metal pipe that has rusted through at the invert may need a spin-cast or a structural liner rather than a thin one. And a line that has lost its grade or collapsed is still a bursting or excavation job; lining does not change geometry, and an installer who promises otherwise is selling, not scoping.

Who the client usually is

• Restaurants and food service: grease-choked lines, slow floor drains, backups during service, and a health inspector who has noticed.
• Apartment, condominium and HOA communities: stacks and collectors in mid-century buildings, shared mains under private streets, and a board that needs a capital plan rather than a string of emergency calls.
• Hotels, hospitals and schools: buildings that cannot close, with stacks that have to be lined floor by floor around occupancy.
• Retail, office and industrial parks: long private mains and storm systems under parking, where a trench means closing the lot and the tenants know it.
• Property managers and engineers: who need a camera survey, a condition report and a phased budget, and a contractor who will put the sequencing in writing.

Surveying first, then a plan

Commercial work starts with a full camera survey of every reach, recorded and logged by distance, with each defect located on the surface and its depth marked. The survey becomes a condition map, and the map becomes a phased scope: what must be done now, what can wait a budget cycle, which reaches get a full liner, which get a point repair, which stacks get descaled and coated, and in what order so that service is never interrupted for more than one night. A property that has lived on a service contract and a drain cable for ten years usually finds the survey pays for itself in the first year of not calling.

Permits, inspections and the utility

Lining a private commercial sewer takes a plumbing permit, and in most jurisdictions the sewer utility also wants to inspect or see video of the finished liner where it connects to the public main. Any pit in the right-of-way takes a street-opening permit. Utilities operating under overflow consent decrees, which is most large utilities in the eastern half of the country, inspect commercial lateral connections closely and can require a leaking one to be fixed on their schedule rather than yours. A verified installer handles the filings and the inspections, and a lined connection shown on camera is what the inspector wants to see.

Pricing commercial lining

Commercial work is priced per foot by diameter, with the cleaning, the bypass pumping, the reinstatements and the access counted separately, and it is nearly always bid against a condition survey rather than a phone call. For most buildings the comparison is not lining versus trenching; it is lining versus the cost of a closure, a demolition and a restoration that would run many times the pipe. The written scope names the reaches, the method for each, the sequencing and the price, and says plainly where a reach has lost its grade and has to be dug.

Getting an installer on the property

The installers listed on this site are prequalified and most do commercial work; a few, noted on their state pages, do only commercial and municipal work. Your state page says who is listed. Where no installer is listed, the national line locates a qualified commercial trenchless contractor near the property and makes the introduction, at no charge.

Estimates are free. Call now. (855) 804-1434