Drain Cleaning
Kitchen lines in 1970s Kentwood ranches and condos hold decades of grease. We clear the clog, then tell you whether the pipe itself needs more than cleaning.
Learn moreWHY KENTWOOD LINES FAIL
How Kentwood's Growth Years
Shape Its Sewer Lines
Most Kentwood plumbing dates to the city’s fastest decade: its population rose from 20,310 in 1970 to 30,438 in 1980, per Census tables in the City of Kentwood 2020 Master Plan. Kentwood became a city in 1967, when residents voted to turn Paris Township into Kentwood, so the oldest streets predate the city itself.
Those township-era houses sit in the window our Grand Rapids branch sees most: neighborhoods built from the 1940s to the early 1970s, where aging Orangeburg sewer lines are still common. Orangeburg is a fiber pipe that softens and goes oval with age. We put a camera in that kind of lateral before any cleaning, because a deformed fiber wall can tear under a jetting nozzle.
Ground conditions add strain. The master plan describes Kentwood soil as mostly heavy silt clays and loams that drain poorly, with sandier pockets along Plaster Creek and west of Kalamazoo Avenue. Roots follow that moisture into pipe joints, and a section that settles can form a belly, a low spot that holds waste until the line backs up.
Kentwood is also a city of condos and rentals. The Assessor counted 22,410 housing units in 2018, 30.24 percent of them apartments, and many large complexes went up in the 1970s and 1980s. Under the city’s rental inspection program, every rental dwelling must be registered and inspected, and the plumbing standard is short: no leaks present. We find and fix leaks and clear shared lines for owners and property managers.
Your water provider depends on Breton Avenue. The Kentwood Water and Sewer Division explains that west of Breton the City of Wyoming supplies the water while Kentwood services water and sewer, and east of Breton the City of Grand Rapids supplies and services both. Ask the right provider where its responsibility ends at your address before any digging.
Winter is the other test. Kentwood’s frozen pipe guidance makes property owners responsible for protecting pipes and the water meter, notes that meters run coldest near the floor and along basement block walls, and tells residents who cannot thaw a pipe to call a plumber. We answer those calls 24/7.
For homes, Kentwood Inspections enforces the 2015 Michigan Residential Building Code, and for commercial plumbing the 2021 Michigan Plumbing Code, per its enforced codes list. Owner Jarod Smith started Clog Busters in 2020. Book Kentwood drain or sewer service online.
