Some jobs start off looking straightforward: replace a broken old clay drainage system, sort out the root invasion, and stop the blockages that need jetting every fortnight, but as anyone in this line of work knows, there’s nearly always a twist.

This one came in the shape of a gym. A private gym, to be exact, sitting right on top of the first 24 metres of the damaged pipework. It was a key part of our customer’s business and built on a solid 200 mm-thick concrete slab. Excavating through that, with a building right in the way, just wasn’t an option.

So, we got creative. Instead of digging, we lined the existing clay pipe from the house invert for those first 24 metres. To do that, we dug a cross trench at the first sensible point to access the pipe, and from there, we installed a brand new plastic foul drainage system running alongside the old one for the remaining 48 metres. That meant we avoided major disruption to the customer and the three other houses connected to the same line.

The liner took about two hours to cure, and once it was set, we hooked up the new system that had already been laid. In the end, total downtime for all four households was just two and a half hours, not bad considering the whole job took four days.