Sewer Line Leak Detection & Repair in Reno, NV

Your sewer lateral is the pipe that carries everything your home drains — every toilet, shower, sink, and laundry — out to the city main under the street. It is almost always buried, usually 4 to 6 feet down, and it fails differently from pressurized supply lines: nothing spins the meter, because sewer lines are not pressurized. Instead, a failing lateral quietly exfiltrates into the soil around it, or slowly narrows until it backs up into the home. That is why sewer leaks are discovered late — a lush strip of lawn in July, a gurgle in a bathroom that has always been 'a little slow,' an odor that comes and goes with the weather.

Reno's sewer landscape has its own signature. The city's mature street trees — maples, cottonwoods, elms — send roots toward the wettest, nutrient-rich joint in the yard, and a sewer lateral is exactly that. Subdivisions built from the 1960s through the 1980s ran clay pipe with jointed sections and, in some-era installs, Orangeburg — materials that root intrusion, freeze-heave, and Truckee Meadows soil movement have been working on for decades. The result is a predictable set of failures: roots at joints, bellies where soil has settled, cracks where the ground moved.

Our approach starts with seeing, not digging. A sewer camera travels the full length of the lateral with a sonde transmitter that logs the exact depth and distance of every defect — you watch the footage with us. Hydrostatic testing confirms whether the line holds water; smoke testing pinpoints where air escapes. Only after the line is documented do we quote repair options at a flat rate, from least disruptive to most — including spot repairs, section replacement, and trenchless methods where the pipe's condition allows them. And the locating data draws the dig plan before a shovel touches soil.