Keeping roots at bay

Hello All,

New to this forum. Just bought a house and discovered almost immediately that every time I used a lot of water (flushed the toilet or took a shower) the drain would back up and flood my basement. Needless to say, I had to hire a plumber to auger the drain. He used the toilet's outlet and hit the obstruction 28 feet in. I have a row of shrubs at the front of my yard and I'm betting it was roots from these shrubs. Aside from ripping these shrubs out to prevent a recurrence, another plumber in the know (who worked for the town) mentioned that I could/should perform "maintenance" to keep the roots at bay. He said there's a chemical I can pour into the drain every now and then to keep the roots from coming back but he couldn't remember the name of the product. Does anyone know the name(s) of any such product(s) that does this? At $80 a pop I certainly don't want to have to call on the plumber every six months to unclog my drain again. In the long run I'm sure the maintenance route would be a lot cheaper.

Root-X
http://www.rootx.com/

drain

Root-x may work. It is a situation where it may not help, but at least it does not cause any problems. $85.00 a pop? You are getting a bargain, or he is not a real plumber.

With drain cleaning every 6 months I'm sure that the job you are getting is worth about what you are paying for it. A substandard job at a cheap price!

I recently had a customer that had been getting a cheap job every 4 months but his regular guy was not available. Several interesting comments were made among them being:
"My regular guy's machine is not as big as yours."
"He didn't use a blade anywhere near as big as yours."

The job was very difficult as the root was very dense from only having a small hole punched through it for so long. I had to run a smaller blade first to get through and only made it after cutting and grinding for a long time. I was about to pack it in and sell an excavation but stuck with it a while longer. I then was able to eventually get a full blade to pass. When I camera'd the line it was completely clean with no roots in the pipe.

The customer is now going to apply Root-X every spring and see how long he gets between cleanings. My guess is that it will be a lot longer than 4 months.

Quite frankly you often get what you pay for!