Real projects. Proven results.

Trenchless Pipe Restoration

A phased trenchless repair for aging cast-iron drain lines at a skilled care facility in Glendale, AZ

The Problem

Like a lot of buildings from a certain era, this facility’s drain lines are original cast iron, and cast iron doesn’t age gracefully. Year over year, the signs kept building: backup calls held at nine or more a year from 2022 onward, underground repair costs crept up alongside them, and by 2025 the team was running camera inspections far more often than in any prior year, trying to get ahead of failures before they turned into emergencies.

A full repipe — the kind of excavate-and-replace project that works for an apartment complex — isn’t a realistic option in a building full of residents who can’t simply relocate while crews tear open floors and walls. Whatever the fix was going to be, it needed to work around the people living there, not through them.

Why the Numbers Made the Decision Easy

The financial case wasn’t subtle. Reactive sewer-related spend at this property — backup calls, underground repairs, drain line repairs, and the camera inspections needed to keep tabs on it all — grew from about $12,500 in 2022 to nearly $43,000 in 2025. It roughly tripled in just the two years between 2023 and 2025 alone, and that trajectory showed no sign of leveling off on its own.

Against that backdrop, the restoration project has cost about $113,000 across all phases to date. That’s a real number, not a small one — but it’s a one-time, planned investment against a reactive cost curve that was compounding year over year with no end point. Left alone, the property was on pace to spend close to that same amount every couple of years just patching the same failing pipe, with nothing to show for it at the end but the next emergency call.

The Solution

Instead of full excavation, the project has used trenchless pipe restoration: cleaning and lining the existing cast iron from the inside rather than removing and replacing it outright. The work has gone in phases:

One small excavation at a central hallway junction to install new access cleanouts, since the old pipe run didn’t have proper access points for this kind of work. Specialized mechanical descaling equipment run through those cleanouts and existing ones to clear grease and scale buildup from the pipe walls. Epoxy pipe lining through toilet flanges and cleanouts for a block of resident rooms, restoring the inside of the pipe without opening walls or floors. A spot repair and epoxy coating on a specific failed section of cast iron discovered near another room, backed by a multi-year warranty.

Each phase has been contained enough that the facility could keep operating normally around it — no wing shutdowns, no resident displacement.

Where Things Stand

The property has completed several phases of this restoration and is currently between phases, planning the next section of the building before moving forward. That’s the right way to run a project like this in an occupied care facility: address the areas with the clearest need, evaluate, and move to the next section on the property’s timeline rather than forcing the whole building through a single disruptive project.

We’ll have a fuller before-and-after story once the next phase is complete, but the approach itself is the takeaway: aging cast-iron plumbing doesn’t have to mean a full repipe, and a full repipe doesn’t have to mean displacing the people who live there.