Posts: 741
Threads: 0
Joined: Mar 2006
06-21-2017, 07:27 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-21-2017, 07:31 AM by jasfrank.)
35 years back I encountered pretty much the same problem in our first house. A 25' long cast iron main under the concrete basement floor, that was about grown shut and was rotted pretty bad. I didn't have extra money so I used a big chisel and maul to knock out the cement above the pipe and replaced it with pvc by being careful to not disturb the original bed. Its still working fine and my cost was about 3 days of hard work and whatever the pipe and bags cement to patch it back up cost back then which wasn't much. Nothing too difficult about the process, just tedious manual labor. They have rubber fernco boots that will connect pvc to the cast iron if you have just a bad section.
Posts: 31,140
Threads: 2
Joined: Mar 2003
Location: Athens, TN
(06-21-2017, 03:15 AM)Destinmatt Wrote: Almost the entire pipe is bad. Both plumbers said it's 30-40' of rotted out cast iron. Jack hammering up the entire house and opening up several walls is a ton more work than digging a trench in dirt and sawing a section out of my driveway for the kitchen reroute.
If your pipe is that bad, you are just kicking the can down the road, so to speak. I say, do it once, do it right and never touch this again.
Rocket Science is more fun when you actually have rockets.
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government." -- Patrick Henry
