Drain Cleaning in Paterson, NJ

Four miles west

Paterson is roughly four miles from Lodi, over the Passaic River. It is the third-largest city in New Jersey and, for our purposes, the one with the oldest residential drainage.

Built for the mills

Paterson was laid out as America's first planned industrial city around the Great Falls in the early 1800s, and the housing that surrounds the old mill districts went up largely between 1880 and 1930. A great deal of it is two-family and three-family, built dense and built to house mill workers.

Century-old drainage under dense multi-family housing produces a specific and repeating set of jobs:

• Shared stacks. Several kitchens and bathrooms meeting in one vertical run. When a first-floor sink fills as the second-floor sink drains, the blockage is below the junction, and nothing done at either sink will help.
• Clay laterals, joints open, roots through them. The default main line failure in this city.
• Cast iron scaled to a fraction of bore. Not blocked — just permanently near capacity, so anything at all tips it over.
• A century of partial repairs. Runs assembled from clay, cast iron, Orangeburg and PVC, with transitions between materials that are the weakest points in the whole line.

Landlords and tenants

Much of our Paterson work is for landlords and building owners rather than occupiers, and the useful thing we can offer there is a clear answer about where the fault is — inside a unit, in the shared stack, or in the lateral out to the street. A camera settles that, and a settled question is usually worth more than the inspection costs.

Restaurants and food premises

Paterson has a very large and very busy food trade. Commercial kitchen lines are grease lines. Cabling bores a channel through grease and buys weeks; hydro jetting strips the wall and buys a maintenance interval. For any kitchen operating at volume, scheduled jetting is cheaper than the closures.

Calling us

(201) 315-6655, day or night, any day of the week. If it is a multi-family building, tell us how many units and which ones are affected — that alone usually identifies whether it is a fixture, a stack or the main.