Sewer Line Repair & Replacement in Greater Akron, OH

Sewer line service covers camera inspection, spot repairs, and full replacement of the lateral between your house and the street. Mackin & Sons is family-owned in Wadsworth, with 17,000+ jobs since 2009 and a 4.9 rating across 600+ Google reviews. Sewer work is where our camera-first habit pays off most, because nobody should approve a four or five figure dig on a guess.

Clog or broken pipe? The camera settles it

A sewer backup can mean a soft clog, and a soft clog can mean a broken pipe underneath it. The difference is thousands of dollars, so we don’t guess. First we clear the line and get your house flowing again, the same drain cleaning work we do every week. Then, when the situation calls for it, we run a video camera through the pipe and look at the actual problem: roots pushing through a joint, a cracked section, a belly holding water and grease, or a collapse.

Our locating equipment marks exactly where the bad spot sits and how deep, whether that’s under the front yard or the basement slab. Any repair that follows is a measured dig in one spot, not an excavation hunt across your lawn.

The classic tell that a line needs more than cleaning: the clog keeps coming back. If you’re getting a drain cabled every few months, something inside the pipe is catching debris, and we wrote up why drains keep clogging in plain terms.

Spot repair or full replacement

If the camera shows one failed joint or one cracked section, a spot repair replaces that piece and leaves the rest of the line alone. That’s the outcome we’re rooting for, because it’s the cheap one.

If the camera shows roots at every joint, a rusted-rough cast iron run, or a line the ground has crushed or bent out of grade, replacement is just honest math. Paying to clean a failing line twice a year, plus the backups in between, costs more over a few years than fixing it once. We show you the footage, explain what cleaning can and can’t buy you, and price both paths so you can decide with real information. Nobody here sells a replacement a repair would fix, and we won’t cable a collapsed pipe and call it fixed.

What about trenchless?

Search sewer repair and you’ll drown in trenchless ads. Two methods exist: pipe lining, which hardens an epoxy sleeve inside the old pipe, and pipe bursting, which breaks the old pipe apart while pulling a new one through. Both avoid digging up the middle of the run, and both get marketed hard.

The honest version: lining needs a mostly sound host pipe and can’t fix a belly or a collapse, the two failures we find most. Bursting still needs access pits dug at both ends. And on a typical 30 to 50 foot residential lateral around here, a conventional dig is often the cheaper fix once real quotes land side by side. Trenchless earns its keep on long runs, deep lines, and pipe under things nobody wants to move, like a mature tree, a garage, or a finished patio.

So start with the camera. If your line is a genuine trenchless candidate, we’ll tell you that, footage in hand, and walk through how that path compares to a dig before you commit to either.

Why sewer lines fail around here

The housing stock around Wadsworth, Barberton, Norton, and Akron skews mid-century, and mid-century laterals were built from clay tile with a joint every few feet. Every joint is a door for tree roots, and roots don’t stop coming back once they find water. Cast iron from the same era rusts rough inside and snags everything that passes. Add our freeze-thaw winters working the clay-heavy soil, and older lines shift into the offsets and bellies that catch debris year after year. If the failure runs all the way into the stack or the drains inside the house, that’s repiping territory, and we handle that too.

What a replacement looks like

You get an on-the-way text and a plumber who starts with the camera and the locator, not a shovel. Once we know exactly what failed and where, you get a flat price in writing. Depth, length, and access drive the scope: a shallow line in an open yard is a smaller job than a deep one under concrete. We dig the one section that needs it, set new pipe at the right grade, verify the repair with the camera, and put the yard back together. If sewage is backing into the house right now, that’s emergency plumbing and we answer those calls day and night.

What it costs

Most full sewer line replacements we’ve done recently landed between $3,000 and $10,000, and spot repairs and cleanings come in well under that. The camera inspection tells us which one you actually need. The dispatch fee is $79 in our core area, $89 across Greater Akron, and it rolls into the job when you approve the work. Financing is available, and the price goes in writing before any digging starts.

If a drain keeps backing up or you already know the sewer line is bad, call 330-825-3686 or book online and we’ll put a camera on it.

What it costs: Sewer work spans a wide range. A camera inspection or spot repair can run a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and most full sewer line replacements we've done recently landed between $3,000 and $10,000 depending on depth, length, and access. You get a flat written price before any digging starts, and financing is available. See our full pricing.