Drain, sewer cleaning & repair in Long Branch, NJ.

Drain and sewer service in Long Branch, NJ

Long Branch has been a sewered city longer than almost anywhere else on this coast, and it is being rebuilt on top of that system right now. Those two facts explain most of the drain calls we take here.

What we handle in Long Branch

• Drain cleaning for kitchen, bath and laundry lines in houses, apartments and rentals
• Main sewer line cleaning out to the city main
• Camera inspections on older laterals and before a property purchase
• Hydro jetting for grease lines behind seasonal kitchens and shared buildings
• Sewer line repair and replacement on tight city lots
• Emergency service nights, weekends and holidays

Your sewer connection may be older than the sewer authority

The Long Branch Sewerage Authority was created by ordinance in 1953. Its original Broadway Avenue treatment works ran until 1968, when the Joline Avenue plant came online, and the plant was upgraded to secondary activated sludge treatment after the 1972 Clean Water Act. The collection system today is roughly five hundred thousand linear feet of sewer main and six pump stations serving about 31,000 people, and the last major rehabilitation of that collection system, the Phase II project, was completed in 2003.

Read those dates against the city around them. Long Branch is an old resort city. In neighborhoods like the West End and Elberon there are buildings that were standing and plumbed before 1953, which means the private connection under some of these properties predates the authority that now runs the public system. That is not true in most towns, and it is the single most useful thing to understand about drains here.

What it means in practice is that the age of the public main tells you very little about the age of your lateral. We have run cameras down lines in this city that were sound and lines a few doors away that were not, on the same block, built decades apart. A pipe of that vintage is usually jointed clay or cast iron, and both give warning: root hair at joints, scale narrowing the bore, a slight dip where the ground moved. The warning only helps if somebody looks.

Then there is the load. The city’s own planning documents describe substantial mixed-use redevelopment in Lower Broadway, Third Avenue, the beachfront and the West End. New density arriving over old private connections is a predictable combination, and the fixture that shows it first is always the lowest one in the oldest building.

Rentals, seasonal turnover and shared lines

A large share of what we clear in Long Branch is not really a pipe defect at all. It is what goes down a drain in a rental town with heavy summer turnover: wipes that are labeled flushable and are not, cooking grease from a hundred short-stay kitchens, and sand. Sand deserves its own mention in a beach city. It settles in traps and low spots and builds a bed that catches everything after it.

In multi-unit buildings the complication is that the fixture backing up and the blockage causing it are often in different apartments. Cabling the overflowing fixture in that situation clears a hole through the blockage and buys a few weeks. Finding where the stack or shared lateral is actually obstructed is what fixes it, and that means a camera and a locate.

What Long Branch customers say

Gina Vintalore called in the morning about a leaking faucet and had it dealt with the same afternoon, without the water being shut off to the whole house.

“I called in the morning with a leaky faucet. Made arrangements to come that afternoon. Michael texted me before he arrived. He put on booties to come in my house and was finished working without shutting off the water in the house within an hour. Very efficient and trustworthy.”

Gina Vintalore

Texting before arrival and covering your floors are small things. They are also the things people remember.

George Vaccarino got a response time that is unusual even for us.

“Tim was very knowledgeable and courteous. I called them and they were here less than a half hour. I will definitely use them again.”

George Vaccarino

Read more customer reviews.