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Kitchen Sewer Maintenance Program

How a Scottsdale senior living facility turned catastrophic kitchen sewer failures into a routine maintenance plan

The Problem

In late 2022, this facility’s kitchen sewer mainline failed. Twice. A section of aging cast-iron pipe running under the kitchen had deteriorated to the point that it required a full excavation — jackhammering through the concrete floor of an active commercial kitchen, digging down several feet, and replacing the failed section with new pipe. The first repair ran nearly $15,000. Weeks later, a second excavation in the same area cost almost exactly the same, after the crew discovered the new dig site was complicated by a high-voltage electrical line running directly above the sewer main. Six weeks after that, a related failure at the kitchen’s dishwasher line required a third excavation.

Three major repairs in under three months, all in the same working kitchen, all disruptive to a facility that can’t simply shut down its kitchen for a few days.

What We Found

During that third repair, our technician did more than patch the immediate problem. We installed a new three-inch cleanout in the kitchen wall — built specifically to give future crews direct access to the line for inspection and cleaning, rather than needing to jackhammer through the floor again the next time buildup or a failing section threatened the mainline.

That cleanout sat there for about two years before the facility moved from one-off repairs to an ongoing plan.

The Solution

Starting in December 2024, the property began recurring hydro jetting service, and by early 2025 had moved to a steady monthly plumbing maintenance plan (our Cabana Club Pro program). Each visit uses that same cleanout to jet the kitchen line, the grease trap tie-in, and the restroom cleanouts near the kitchen — clearing grease and buildup before it can turn into another mainline failure.

The Results

Since the recurring plan started, there has been no repeat of a kitchen mainline failure anywhere near the scale of the 2022 incidents. Looking at the numbers:

• Sewer/drain line repair spend is down roughly 88% on a per-year basis compared to before the recurring plan began.
• The average cost of a major plumbing repair (jobs over $2,000) dropped from around $7,900 to around $3,700 — spend is going toward smaller, routine fixes instead of emergency excavations.
• The underground repair work that has happened since has stayed in the low thousands, nowhere near the $15,000 excavations from 2022.

It’s worth being direct about what this data does not show: the total number of plumbing service calls at the property didn’t go down, and neither did routine drain-clog tickets. A meaningful share of those are toilets and sinks clogged by wipes, incontinence care products, and other items that end up in the line — an unavoidable reality of a 24/7 care facility, not something any jetting schedule can fully prevent. Overlapping renovation work at the property during this same period also added to overall service volume.

What the recurring plan changed is the type of problem this facility deals with. Instead of the plumbing team getting a call about a flooded kitchen and a multi-day excavation, they’re getting routine, scheduled visits that catch buildup and small issues before they become the next five-figure emergency. For a facility where a kitchen or a resident wing going offline isn’t just expensive but genuinely disruptive to operations, that shift — from unpredictable catastrophic failures to planned, routine maintenance — is the real result.