Sewer Cleanout Installation

American Eagle Plumbing & Construction

What is a Sewer Cleanout and Where Do I Find It?

You hope it never happens, but a drain or sewer line in your home can get clogged. If that happens, you don’t want to dig up your yard or tear out walls trying to find the clog and clear it up. To avoid that headache, plumbing systems have sewer cleanouts that allow access to your drains and sewer lines. Depending on your home’s age, you may have as few as one or as many as ten access points for sewer line cleaning.

What Is a Sewer Cleanout?

Sewer cleanouts are a crucial part of your home’s plumbing system. When drain or sewer line clogs occur, the sewer cleanout allows access to those pipes for— you guessed it—cleaning them out. Using mechanical and motorized drain snakes, your plumbing technician can reach further into your hidden drain lines to pull out stubborn clogs. Sewer line blockages can be accessed with high-definition video cameras to pinpoint their locations and equipment to perform snaking or hydro-jetting.

How Do I Locate My Sewer Cleanout?

Your sewer cleanouts appear on your home’s sides, usually adjacent to kitchen and bathroom drain lines, but they may be in slightly different locations according to your home’s construction.

Pier and Beam Homes:
These cleanouts are easy to spot on a pier and beam home, as they are located just under the exterior floorboards, with a capped, white plastic pipe extending out from the house.
Slab Foundation Homes:
In homes with a slab foundation, the cleanouts appear as small openings next to your home, usually with a plastic cap, resembling small manhole covers.
Older Homes:
In older homes that have not had their galvanized drain and sewer lines replaced with PVC, finding the sewer cleanout can be challenging. The only point of access to the sewer line is often located on the roof, where the sewer line is vented for sewer gases to escape. For the luckier owners of older homes, the sewer cleanout will appear as a pipe extending 6″ – 8″ out of the ground, often with a steel cap on top that gives it a “mushroom”-like appearance.

Why Do I Need to Keep My Cleanouts Clean?

Keeping your drain and sewer lines clean allows drains to empty freely, toilets to flush thoroughly, and keeps sewer gases from escaping into your home. The unpleasantness of sewer gases is apparent to anyone with a nose, but the ammonia, methane, and sulfur dioxide they produce can harm your health.

Sewer gas is toxic, and in high enough concentrations, can render a person unconscious in seconds. Common symptoms of sewer gas exposure include difficulty breathing, eye irritation, headaches, nausea, vomiting, sore throat, and dizziness.

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How Do I Open a Sewer Cleanout?

While locating your sewer cleanouts is a pretty easy task, getting them open can be tricky. For PVC (white plastic) cleanouts, a threaded plastic cap is installed with a molded nut at the center. Using a pipe wrench or a pair of slip-joint pliers, grab the center nut and slowly start to turn it counter-clockwise, or “lefty-loosey,” and remove the cap. If the cap resists being removed, try WD-40 or another spray lubricant, and wait a few minutes before trying again.

Snaking your cleanouts is a project that can be tackled by a handy homeowner, but if pulling raw sewage out of a pipe is not your idea of a fun afternoon, call in a professional, like American Eagle Plumbing & Construction.

Do I Need to Have a Sewer Line Cleanout Installed?

For homes built before the 1970s, which includes a large part of El Sobrante, the only access to your sewer cleanout may be on the roof via your sewer pipe vent. In a single-family home with a small yard, plumbing snakes and video cameras are probably long enough to reach a blockage that is up to 150 feet away. For two and three-story homes with large front yards, there may not be a snake long enough to reach the city sewer connection, the goal of every sewer line plumber worth his plunger.

What Is the Cost of Installing a Sewer Cleanout?

It’s a smart idea to install a more easily accessible sewer line cleanout in an existing plumbing system, regardless of PVC or galvanized installations. Depending on the job’s difficulty, cleanout installation will cost the average homeowner between $650 – $2,000, with the highest cost reserved for those that require extensive digging and retrofitting.

Let American Eagle Plumbing & Construction Take Care of Your Sewer Cleanout

If you’re considering a sewer line cleanout installation in your home, give the experts at American Eagle Plumbing & Construction a call at (510) 253-8049. You can also contact us online. We employ only licensed, experienced, and thoroughly background-checked plumbing technicians to come to your home.

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