Commercial Sewer Contractor for General Contractors & Property Managers

We are the underground sewer sub for general contractors and property managers in the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles. Camera the existing building sewer before a remodel, replace a failed lateral under a parking lot, jet a restaurant grease line before handover. Our own crew and equipment, CSLB #720343, out of Northridge.

Sewer sub for your job

Compact machines that fit a side yard, a parking lot or a courtyard.

Who calls us

• General contractors on remodels and tenant improvements. You are gutting a 1970s office or retail space and the drawings say "existing building sewer to remain." We put a camera in before your floors go back down, so a cracked cast iron line under the slab turns up now, not after the tenant moves in.
• Restaurant and food-service builders. Existing grease lines jetted and filmed before handover, and grease trap pump-outs on a schedule after opening. See grease trap cleaning.
• Property managers of apartment buildings, strip centers, office parks and industrial buildings. Recurring backups, root problems, and the one building on the site that has had the same clog three times this year.
• HOAs and condo boards dealing with a shared main under the driveway that nobody wants to own.
• Buyers and lenders on commercial deals. A camera run of the building sewer during due diligence, with a written report you can take to the seller.
• Public works primes. That work has its own page: sewer and CCTV subcontracting for primes.

What Valley commercial buildings usually have underground

Most of the commercial stock in the Valley went up between the late 1950s and the 1980s. Think of the strip centers along Ventura Boulevard and Reseda Boulevard, the industrial parks off Nordhoff Street and Canoga Avenue in Chatsworth, and the buildings around Van Nuys Airport. Under the slab you usually find 4-inch cast iron. Out to the street you find a 6-inch clay lateral, sometimes with a newer PVC repair spliced in with rubber couplings.

Cast iron under a slab rusts from the inside, and the bottom of the pipe goes first, where the water sits. The photos below show what comes out: the top of the pipe looks fine and the bottom has rotted through. Clay laterals fail at the joints, where roots from parking-lot ficus and street trees get in. Many of these joints were also shifted by the 1994 Northridge earthquake. None of it shows on a walk-through. It shows on camera.

What we do for your job

• Camera inspection of the building sewer and lateral, with a recorded video, a written report and locate marks. See sewer camera inspection.
• Sewer line repair and replacement, spot repair to full replacement, including under slabs and parking lots. See sewer line repair.
• Trenchless lining and pipe bursting, when digging up a lot or a finished floor costs more than the pipe. See trenchless sewer repair.
• Hydro-jetting of mains, grease lines and storm drains. See hydro-jetting.
• Root cutting and follow-up maintenance.
• Emergency backups at occupied buildings, any hour. See emergency sewer service.

What we do not do: fixtures, water heaters, water supply repiping, gas piping, fire lines or rough plumbing inside a new building. We are the underground sewer trade on your job, and we tell you on the first call if a scope item belongs to someone else.

What a GC gets from us

1. A real number, fastLump sum, time and materials, or unit price, whichever your contract uses. Usually inside one business day, with our assumptions written out so you are not carrying a hidden exclusion.
2. Paperwork the same dayLicence, W-9, certificate of insurance, and an additional insured endorsement naming you and the owner.
3. Permits and inspectionWe pull the sewer permit with LA Department of Building and Safety, or with the city the job is in, and meet the inspector.
4. We fit your scheduleWe work around the framers and the concrete pour, not the other way around. If a site needs night or weekend work to keep a business open, say so.
5. Video before and afterYou get the camera run of the finished line for your closeout package and the owner's file.

Where we work

All of the San Fernando Valley, from Chatsworth and Porter Ranch to Sherman Oaks and Burbank, plus Calabasas, Glendale, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles. For public agency work, see municipal and public works.

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