Drain Cleaning in Elmwood Park, NJ

North-west of Lodi on the Passaic River, where Route 80 crosses into Bergen County.

Two miles north-west

Elmwood Park is a short run from the Lodi shop, sitting on the Passaic River with Route 80 running through it and Garfield, Saddle Brook and Fair Lawn around it.

Mixed housing, mixed pipe

Elmwood Park — East Paterson until 1973 — has housing from several distinct eras, and the drainage under it varies more than in a borough that filled in all at once. There are pre-war houses on the older streets toward the river, a substantial amount of 1950s and 1960s single-family, and garden apartment complexes.

The consequence is that there is no single default answer here the way there is in, say, Garfield. The pipe under a given house might be clay, cast iron, Orangeburg or PVC depending on when it was built and what has been done to it since. Which is a real argument for looking before digging: a camera survey on an Elmwood Park lateral tells you what material you are dealing with, and material determines everything else.

Orangeburg is worth flagging specifically. It was used widely in the middle of the last century, it is made of bituminised fibre rather than clay or metal, and it deforms as it ages — the round pipe goes oval and eventually collapses. Cleaning does not fix it and can finish it off. If a camera shows an oval bore, the section needs replacing, and anyone offering to cable it repeatedly is selling you a problem rather than solving one.

Garden apartments

The apartment complexes here have shared drainage serving many units. As anywhere with a shared stack, a blockage below the junction affects everyone above it, and the fix is on the main run rather than in the individual apartment that happened to notice first.

The Passaic and the low ground

Low-lying streets near the river see groundwater in saturated conditions. Same pattern as the rest of the river boroughs: the basement floor drain is the lowest opening, and it is where the water arrives.