Drain cleaning inBurnaby

In the towers: is it your drain or the building's?

Metrotown, Brentwood, Highgate and Lougheed are dense with residential towers, and in a tower your suite's drains connect to a shared waste stack running the height of the building.

Here's how to tell the difference before you call anyone:

Just your suite, one fixture — a sink, shower or toilet backing up while everything else works. That's an in-suite blockage and it's yours. Usually hair, grease or something that shouldn't have gone down.

Just your suite, several fixtures — could still be your branch line where it meets the stack.

Multiple suites, especially on lower floors — that's the stack, and it's common property. The strata is generally responsible, and a resident paying a plumber to clear a building's stack from inside their own bathroom is paying for the wrong thing.

Gurgling with nothing blocked — often a venting problem in the stack rather than a blockage at all. Also usually the building's.

We identify which and document it in writing, which is what your property manager will want. If it's the building's, we'll tell you that even though it means a smaller job for us.

In the older neighbourhoods: roots and cast iron

Burnaby Heights, Capitol Hill and Willingdon Heights are largely ⁨1940s–60s⁩ bungalows on established streets with mature trees, and they behave like Vancouver's east side. Clay sewer laterals, mortared joints, roots.

There's a second issue specific to housing of this age: cast iron waste stacks inside the house. Cast iron corrodes and scales internally over decades, narrowing the bore and catching debris. A drain that has slowed gradually over years — rather than blocking suddenly — is often scale rather than a blockage, and cabling gives you a temporary improvement at best.

A camera tells you which.

Edmonds, South Burnaby and the later subdivisions

The late-80s and 90s development through Edmonds and South Burnaby has newer drainage — usually ABS rather than clay — which means fewer root problems and more of the ordinary causes: grease in kitchen lines, and the occasional badly graded run from an original installation.

Big Bend, with its industrial and agricultural land, is a different category again: catch basins, trench drains and site drainage rather than residential lines.

Grease is the constant

Whatever the neighbourhood, kitchen lines block for the same reason everywhere: grease cools in the horizontal run and hardens.

Cabling punches through it. Hydro jetting removes it. For a kitchen line that has blocked before, jetting is the one that actually solves the problem.

A plumbing permit must be obtained before a plumbing system is constructed, extended, altered, renewed, repaired or maintained. Clearing plugged soil or waste pipes and repairing water pipe leaks do not require a plumbing permit. City of Burnaby: Burnaby Plumbing Bylaw 2000, Consolidated Bylaw No. 11148C

The City lays the sewer connection from the public sewer to the property line. The property owner builds the building sewer that runs from the building to the City's sewer connection at the property line. City of Burnaby: Burnaby Sewer Connection Bylaw 1961, Consolidated Bylaw No. 4247C

Digging up public property to repair or replace a public sewer connection needs the City Engineer's prior written permission. City of Burnaby: Burnaby Plumbing Bylaw 2000, Consolidated Bylaw No. 11148C