How to Prevent Tree Roots from Ruining Your Sewer Lines?

Trees play a big role in improving the aesthetics of your property. They provide shade and for some, they even transformed as an extension of your home. However, trees can be a threat in your properties too. A branch may fall and damage your roof during a rainy or windy day. Older trees may break and fall, damaging areas in your property. In most cases, tree roots can also enter your home plumbing and cause cracks without your knowledge.

Although there are risks for having trees inside your property and near your home, they can be controlled to your advantage. Branches can be cut down and tree leaves can be trimmed to prevent possible accidents during storms and hurricanes. Tree roots can be prevented from damaging your plumbing system.

Here are a few tips on how you can prevent tree roots from entering and damaging your home plumbing.Install tree root barriers before construction or before they reach the concrete.

One of the most basic precautions to help prevent tree roots from entering and damaging your sewer lines are root barriers. This is mainly installed before the actual home construction. If you want to keep existing trees inside your property prior to building your homes, have barriers installed to protect your foundations and sewer pipes from possible root invasion.

For properties that are already built without root barriers, you can always install one as long as tree roots are still far from your home foundations. In some cases, you can cut roots to prevent further growth and then install a root barrier after. Blocked sewer Sydney issues are commonly caused by tree root invasion. You can avoid this by doing this option.

Copper Sulphate and Potassium Hydroxide

Before installing root barriers, an additional preventive measure to avoid root invasion is by spreading chemicals near your sewer lines. Potassium hydroxide and copper sulphate are the most common chemicals used to inhibit root growth around sewer lines. You can apply these chemicals inside the perimeter of your roof barriers as well as outside the perimeter to prevent tree roots from damaging your root barriers too.

Sewer line video camera inspections

Unlike other home plumbing problems, root invasion is quite harder to diagnose compared to other plumbing issues. There are many signs of possible tree roots in your sewer, but the signs may be similar to other plumbing issues that you may have at home. To be sure, you may need to hire the help of a professional plumber that can do a live video camera inspection on your sewer line. The inspection requires inserting a small camera through the lateral of the pipes to see any potential tree root invasion in the pipes. Clogs, blocks and cracks can also be identified through this process. For any clogs found in the pipers, you can use a cable to run water through the pipe to clear clogs as well as to cut tree roots that have already entered the sewer line.

Vinegar, baking soda and table salt solution

If you are looking for a more environmentally friendly root killer, your best bet would be the salt, baking soda, vinegar and boiling water mixture. It can be flushed down the drain or if you have access to your sewer line pipes, you can pour the mixture down the root infiltrated area for faster results. This solution can kill roots on contact. However, washing away the dead roots may take time so the results are not as immediate compared to other solutions listed in this article.

Tree roots in your sewer lines can be resolved easily. With the right tools or the right professional to work with your home sewer line issue, you can fix his problem in no time.