Cleaning The Pipes

I have a friend who owns a 100 year old house in San Francisco. As with many other 100 year old homes in San Francisco, the sewer line at my friend's house started to have problems. In this case, heavy rains caused my friend's sewer line to pool water and create a waterfall in his neighbor's garage.

The plumber who fixed the sewer performed a trenchless repair. This is like having a "sewerplasty" for your home.

In a trenchless sewer repair, the plumber first sends a camera through the sewer pipe to find breaks in the line and determine the line geometry. After fixing broken pipe and clearing out debris, the plumber coats the inside of the old pipe with a new plastic layer. Different trenchless technologies coat the pipes in different ways, but generally they put a bladder in the sewer line to mold some combination of epoxy and fiberglass to the form of the existing pipes.

Trenchless sewer repair requires much less digging than traditional sewer repair. Not surprisingly, it costs 30% - 50% as much as traditional repairs.

Here's a news piece (or promotional video, if you will) about trenchless sewer repair.



I spoke to the plumber who performed the repair for my friend. The plumber told me two interesting things. First, the plumber had tried one trenchless technology and rarely had a successful repair. Later he switched to the trenchless technology that he was using on my friend's house.

Second, the plumber said that he was waiting a couple days to get an inspector who had seen a trenchless repair. He complained that inspectors who had not seen a trenchless repair often had more questions or brought up irrelevant concerns.

Both these points seemed to me like artifacts of the fragmented market that home repair is. They also demonstrate how difficult it is to introduce a new technology into a mature market, even if it saves substantial time and money.

If you look up trenchless technology on the Internet, you'll find that it has many applications beyond home sewer repair. As an emerging technology, trenchless pipe laying and pipe repair could replace traditional pipe installation and pipe repair methods. For instance, it seems possible to make a device whose head has a bore, a camera, and a wireless navigation system, and whose tail has a trenchless pipe system. It could lay pipes in municipalities without digging up streets, sidewalks, and backyards.

If it could be made, what would retard the adoption of this magic urban piping technology? To start with, both things mentioned by the plumber: device certification (which the plumber performed de facto), and education of the regulators. Beyond that, though, labor unions and other entrenched interested, so to speak, would work to maintain the status quo.

An emerging idea is that mature markets need outside stimuli to foster change. Free market theories claim that a market will adjust by itself. At a practical level, the plumber pointed out two reasons why valuable new technologies may flounder in a mature market even when they provide significant economic benefit. The Internet, a free market in constant flux, may provide some clues about how to de-mature a market, or how to introduce free market operations back into sclerotic mature market.