Sewer Line Repair & Replacement

Erica’s Plumbing repairs, lines, and replaces sewer lines across Broward and Palm Beach County — the lateral that runs from your house out to the city main. Licensed Florida plumbing contractor #CFC1427956, woman-owned since 2009, available 24/7. We camera the line and show you the footage before anyone quotes you a number. Call 561-260-5763.

First, a distinction that matters more than it sounds like it should.

Your house has two different sets of buried pipe, and people use “sewer line” for both. The drain lines under your slab run from your fixtures to the edge of the building — in most older South Florida homes those are cast iron, and they’re a different conversation. The sewer lateral picks up where those leave off and carries everything out under your yard, usually under a driveway or a right-of-way, to the city main.

Different pipe, different age, sometimes different material, definitely different repair. This page is about the lateral. If a contractor quotes you a “sewer replacement” without telling you which one they mean, that’s your first question.

Anyone can tell you they do trenchless. The useful thing is knowing when trenchless is the wrong answer.

A resin-saturated liner is pulled or inverted into the existing pipe and cured in place, forming a new pipe inside the old one. No trench. Your driveway, your pavers, and your ficus stay where they are.

Right when: the line is structurally intact but corroded, cracked, or root-infiltrated, and the grade is correct.

Wrong when: the pipe is collapsed, badly offset, or has a belly. A liner conforms to the host pipe — it does not correct alignment. See below.

A bursting head is pulled through the old pipe, fracturing it outward while dragging new HDPE in behind. Two access pits instead of a full trench. You get a brand-new pipe, and you can upsize the diameter.

Right when: the pipe is too far gone to line, but the path is workable and the grade is right.

Wrong when: there’s a belly, or the line runs too close to other utilities to fracture safely. Bursting follows the existing path — it doesn’t re-grade it either.

Open a small area, cut out the bad section, put in new pipe, close it up. Unglamorous, and frequently the right answer — a lot of “you need a full replacement” quotes are really one bad joint.

Right when: the damage is localized and the rest of the line cameras clean. A root intrusion at one joint, a crushed section where somebody drove a truck over it.

Wrong when: the camera shows the same deterioration up and down the whole run. Then you’re just buying the first of many.

Dig the line, take it out, lay new pipe at proper slope, backfill, restore. The oldest method, the most disruptive, and — for one specific problem — the only one that actually works.

Right when: the line has a belly or a grade problem, the alignment needs to change, or the pipe is collapsed to the point that nothing can be pulled through it.

Wrong when: a trenchless method would genuinely work and somebody’s selling you a trench because it’s what they own.

Sewer laterals are the most expensive thing most homeowners will ever have quoted sight-unseen. Here’s what to know before somebody hands you a number.

This is the one that costs us the easy sale, and it’s the most important thing on this page.

A belly is a sag — a low spot where the pipe has settled out of its slope. South Florida is sand and fill over a high water table, and fill settles. When a section of your lateral drops, water stops flowing through it and starts standing in it. Solids drop out in the puddle. That’s your recurring backup, and it will happen forever, because gravity isn’t negotiating.

Now: a liner conforms to the pipe it’s installed in. Run CIPP through a bellied line and you get a beautiful, brand-new, fully warranted lined belly. Same sag. Same standing water. Same backups. Pipe bursting doesn’t save you either — the bursting head follows the existing path, so the new HDPE lands in the same low spot the old pipe was in.

The only thing that fixes a belly is digging it up and re-laying the pipe at proper slope. That’s it. That’s the list.

So when a company quotes you trenchless over the phone, or before they’ve camera’d the line, they are guessing — and if you have a belly, they’re about to sell you an expensive repair that doesn’t repair anything. Ask them directly: did you see a belly, and if so, how does lining fix it? Watch what happens.

We camera first and we’ll tell you when trenchless is wrong, even though trenchless is the job we’d rather sell.

The most common surprise on a sewer job is finding out where your responsibility ends.

In most South Florida municipalities the property owner owns the lateral from the building all the way to the connection at the city main — and that frequently includes the portion running under the sidewalk, the swale, and the street itself. The city maintains the main. You maintain everything that gets to it.

That means a failure fifteen feet out under the pavement can still be yours, and it can require a right-of-way permit, traffic control, and pavement restoration on top of the plumbing.

This varies by city, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re in before you need to. Some jurisdictions take ownership at the property line or at the cleanout. Call your utility department and ask where their responsibility starts — it’s a two-minute phone call that can be worth thousands.

We’ll pull the right-of-way permit if the work needs one. But nobody should be finding this out for the first time with a backhoe already in the yard.

We’re plumbers, not insurance agents, so treat this as a prompt to go read your policy rather than as advice. But it comes up on every single sewer job, so here it is.

Standard homeowners policies generally exclude gradual deterioration — wear, corrosion, rust, root intrusion, settling. Which is to say: they exclude essentially every way a sewer lateral actually fails. A pipe that rotted out over fifty years didn’t have an “occurrence.” It got old.

Two things you can often add: service line coverage, an endorsement that covers buried utility lines on your property, and water backup coverage, which is separate and covers the damage inside when a line backs up. Both are typically inexpensive add-ons. Most people don’t have either and find out at the worst moment.

Go look at your declarations page. If you own a pre-1980 house in Broward or Palm Beach County, this is a worthwhile fifteen minutes. And whatever your agent tells you, get it in writing.

Ficus, banyan, melaleuca, and poinciana are aggressive, opportunistic, and everywhere in this region. But they do not break into a sound, sealed pipe. They can’t.

What roots do is find water. A joint that’s separated, a crack, a corroded section already weeping — in a Florida dry season, that’s the wettest thing in the soil, and roots go to it. Once a hair-thin root is through, it thickens, and now you have a mass in the line catching everything that goes by.

So the root ball is real and it needs to come out. But cutting roots without asking how they got in is the plumbing equivalent of mopping around a leak. They’ll be back, on roughly the same schedule, forever.

If a camera shows roots, the actual finding is the defect that let them in. That’s what determines whether you’re looking at a spot repair, a lining, or a replacement. Anybody who jets your roots annually and never mentions the joint is running a subscription, not a repair.

South Florida runs on associations, and sewer responsibility inside a community is governed by documents, not by intuition.

In most condo buildings, the line from your unit to the building stack is yours and the stack is the association’s — but that’s a generalization, and your declaration is the actual answer. In HOA communities with private streets, the association often owns the collection system out to wherever the city picks up, which means a lateral failure can be a board problem, an owner problem, or both, depending on where it is.

Many buildings also have a private lift station, which the property owner maintains — not the city. Boards are routinely surprised by this the first time one fails.

Read the docs before you authorize work. We’ll camera the line, locate the defect, mark exactly where it sits relative to the building, and give you footage and a written report — which is usually what the board or the management company needs before anyone can approve anything. We work with associations constantly.

A lateral problem announces itself differently than a drain problem.

Your lowest fixtures back up first. Tub, shower, floor drain. Water finds the lowest opening it can. If your toilet is fine but the guest tub is filling, that’s not a tub problem.

Multiple fixtures at once, all over the house. A branch line affects a group. The lateral affects everything.

The toilet bubbles when the washer drains. The classic. Air displaced by a large volume of water has nowhere to go.

One patch of lawn is greener than the rest. Congratulations, your lateral is fertilizing it. That’s a leak, and roots already know.

A soft or sunken spot in the yard, or a sinkhole over the line. Soil washing into a broken pipe. Take this one seriously.

Sewage odor outside near the line. Not normal. A sound sewer is a sealed system.

Recurring backups every few months. Read this first — the cycle is the diagnosis.

Sewage in the house. Stop running water and call now. Emergency.

1. We camera the line. Before anything else, and before any number gets quoted. We locate the defect, mark the depth and position on the ground, and identify the pipe material. You get the footage.

2. You see what we see. On screen, with us, while it’s happening. A belly, an offset joint, roots, scale, a crack, a collapse — you’ll know which one you have and roughly where it is.

3. You get options with real numbers. Lining, bursting, spot repair, or open-cut — with what each costs, what each fixes, and what each doesn’t. If trenchless won’t solve your problem we say so, even though it’s the job we’d rather sell.

4. We pull the permits. Sewer work is permitted through your city’s building department, and if the line runs into the right-of-way it needs a separate permit and restoration. That’s on us, and it’s in the quoted price.

5. We do the work and put it back. Backfill, compaction, and surface restoration. Warrantied. Financing available — most sewer laterals are not a checkbook repair, and we’d rather you fix it right than defer it.

If it already backed up into the house, we’re IICRC certified for restoration and licensed as a general contractor. The line repair, the cleanup, and the rebuild stay with one company.

Licensed: CFC1427956 · CAC1822846 · CGC1519396. Woman-owned since 2009.