DRAIN CLEANING

Drain Cleaning

Drain cleaning is essential to maintaining the smooth operation of any home or business. At Big Boy Enterprises, we clear blockages before they lead to serious problems such as backups or flooding. Over time, clogged drains can slow down water flow, creating frustration and inefficiency. Our drain-cleaning services ensure your pipes are clean, enabling water to flow quickly and freely. Regular maintenance also means extending the lifespan of your plumbing, reducing the risk of future damage or costly repairs.

This is a proactive investment in the health of your property’s systems. While we’re known for keeping drains clear, our expertise extends beyond that. We also take care of AC repair and offer comprehensive HVAC services to keep your environment comfortable year-round. Your home or business deserves systems that function without interruptions, whether it’s drains, air conditioning, or heating. Big Boy Enterprises is here to keep your drains and other vital systems performing as they should. Reach out now!

Recent Drain Cleaning Work

How We Clear a Drain

Cabling is the standard approach and it handles most of what we see: a motorised auger fed down the line with a cutting head sized to the pipe, which breaks through the blockage and pulls it back. It is quick, it works, and on a simple blockage it is the right tool.

Hydro jetting is the heavier option, using high pressure water to scour the full inside diameter of the pipe rather than punching a hole through the middle of what is in it. That distinction matters on a line furred up with grease or scale, because a cable makes a channel through it and the line blocks again in a few months, while jetting takes the pipe back to something close to its actual bore.

A camera goes down the line when the same drain keeps blocking. Repeat blockages are nearly always telling you something structural: roots at a joint, a section that has bellied and holds water, a partial collapse, or a fitting that was installed backwards years ago. Clearing that line again without looking is a service you will be buying annually.

Why It Blocked

Kitchen lines are usually grease, which is liquid when it goes down and solid twenty feet along where the pipe is cold. Bathroom lines are hair and soap. Toilets are wipes, including the ones sold as flushable, which do not break down and which we pull out of lines constantly. Main lines are more often roots, which find the tiny amount of moisture at a joint and grow into it, or a structural problem in the pipe itself.

Older properties bring their own version. Cast iron corrodes and scales internally until the bore is a fraction of what it was. Clay laterals, still in the ground under plenty of older properties here, have joints every few feet and roots find every one of them.

Septic Systems, Which Is Most Properties Outside the Village

A large share of the properties we work on around Chase and through the Shuswap are on septic rather than sewer, and it changes the diagnosis. A slow drain on a septic property is not automatically a blocked line. It can be a tank that is full and has not been pumped, an outlet baffle that has failed, or a field that is saturated, and cabling the line does nothing for any of those.

The tell is usually whether one fixture is slow or all of them are. One fixture is a blockage in that branch. Everything in the house at once, particularly with gurgling in the lowest fixtures, points at the main line or the tank. Worth knowing before you call, and worth saying on the phone, because it changes what we bring.

Where We Work

Chase

The village sits on the flats at the outlet of Little Shuswap Lake, and the mature trees that make the older streets pleasant are the same trees finding the joints in the older laterals. Root intrusion is genuinely the most common main line cause we see in Chase. Properties immediately outside the village boundary are on septic, and the diagnosis changes accordingly.

Kamloops

Forty minutes west, and the older stock is the interesting part. North Kamloops and Brocklehurst still have plenty of cast iron drainage in service, and cast iron does not block the way modern ABS does. It scales, the bore narrows over decades, and eventually a normal amount of use is too much for what is left. That is a jetting and camera job rather than a cable job, and clearing it once without looking usually means clearing it again.

Salmon Arm

Thirty-five minutes east. A wide range of building age, so the work splits fairly evenly between straightforward blockages in newer properties and the root and cast iron problems that come with the older stock closer to the lake. Properties on the outskirts move back onto septic.

The Shuswap

Sorrento, Blind Bay, Scotch Creek, Sicamous and the lake communities, where nearly everything is on septic and a large share of it is seasonal. Two patterns recur. Lines that sit unused for months dry out, and what was a manageable amount of residue sets hard, which is why so many of these calls come in the first week the property is back in use. And a system sized for a family of four gets a house full of guests for a long weekend, which is a load it was never designed for. Both are predictable, which means both can be got ahead of.

Keeping It Clear

Grease into the bin rather than the sink, no wipes down the toilet regardless of what the packet says, strainers on the shower and the kitchen sink, and on a septic property a pumping interval that is actually kept to rather than remembered when something goes wrong. If a line has needed clearing twice, get a camera down it rather than buying the same service a third time.

Common Questions