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I guess not a lot of ABS for sewers and drains here in city-data?
It doesn't take long to destroy cast iron sewer lines... manage some property in one subdivision and a few have had cast iron turned into Swiss cheese.... and it goes fast with acidic drain cleaners...
ABS is what I use for DWV. Yea, cast and acid cleaners don't get along well. Personally, I don't like using chemical cleaners on plugs. Often they make the problem worse. Then you have a line full of acid that needs to come apart to fix. I rod plugs. Chemicals cause more problems than they fix.
Makes sense and 95% of the time it is fully tenant caused...
5% there are legit building issues like tree roots etc.
When you manage the same units for decades and one family has nothing but plumbing issues and the families before and after have none it's just another indicator of how hard some are on things.
One of the best moves I have ever made as a property manager was to stop supplying free standing appliances... half my maintenance issues disappeared.
Copper used to be king for pressurized water lines. A few years ago during the housing bubble everyone switched to PEX because copper cost too much.
Is PEX king still? Or has copper resurfaced as the best plumbing lines?
We had our shower gutted and tiled. We added some features to our plumbing and we were told that Pex was what they used and that it had a 60 year life.
Pex allows for a lot of flexibility in shower planning.
The appearance of these so called "flushable" baby wipes and feminine hygiene products has been a gold mine for plumbers. I had a maintenance contract for a private reform academy from 2005-2008 and early in they started using these "flushables". They didn't say anything about it to me and just assumed they were safe. So, I gets a call, on a Friday afternoon with a holiday weekend ahead that the main classroom building was stopped up end to end. It's a long story about this building but the short version is I couldn't get my big Ridgid beast through the plug. I knew I had hit it but the coil just stopped cold. When I pulled it back, HUGE wad of "flushables" wrapped up on the head. I went down and back down and back yanking these things out till the wee hours of the next morning and finally just gave up.
The administrator and I met later that morning, me looking and feeling as if I'd been holed up in a cave eating raw meat and washing it down with rot gut whiskey, and I told him I was going to have to dig. I wound up digging the entire line end to end and replacing it. It was the original line put in during the late 50s, 6" Orangeberg, and over half of the 400 foot run was packed with "flushables" and old roots. Total loss. BIG money fix. The line would have gone soon enough without the flushables, they just hastened things a bit. I made some serious coin on that contract.
They got closed down and believe me I did cry the blues. It was literally bread and butter. The kids there were spoiled rich kids who's folks just couldn't throw enough money at them to keep them out of trouble, this outfit had money, didn't mind spending it, and had plumbing/heating issues aplenty without the damage the kid did. Monkey stomping toilets, ripping drinking fountains off wall, wadding up washcloths and paper towels and stuffing the toilets full, tearing sinks and showers off the walls, you name it. The place was a full time job.
And the girls were more destructive and nasty in their methods than the boys were. One of their favorite stunts was to hose up the toilets then s*** them full. The boys never did that but the girls did. Regular. The school finally adopted a policy that such damage would be paid for by the offenders parents. It was running into tens of thousands of dollars just in labor costs alone. Then add in more tens of thousands in broken fixtures. That their folks had to eat these bills on top of their...tuition..didn't slow these little rodents down a whit either. If anything they got worse, but the school just shrugged and paid every bill I turned in no questions asked.
It was grueling nasty work, and that sort of work doesn't come cheap. I had costs to ber as well. Hep vaccs for my guys and I, safety gear, cleaning and sterilization gear and supplies, overtime for whoever I sent on a call if I didn't do it myself, insurance, on and on. Oh yea, these kids were just little darling angels. That's the thing ya know. Just like some wonderful tenants they know full well what's should and shouldn't go down toilets and sink drains. I know if I were a landlord there wouldn't be any garbage disposals on kitchen sinks and I would be merciless on tenants who abuse the plumbing.
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