Sewer connection on the private side

Today the brothers from AV Mechanical is here to finish my private portion of the sewer connection. When City of Toronto contractors did the city portion of the new sewer connection, they informed me that I still have clay pipes down there. Apparently only a small portion of the private portion of the sewer pipe was replaced with plastic pipes and the rest are still clay pipes. That’s how I ended up asking Angelo and his crew to come and dig up the ground again, so that the remaining sewer connection can all be replaced with proper PVC piping and then connect my sewer connection to the city portion.

This time they rented a slightly bigger excavator because the small one just doesn’t work all that well. Here they are digging up the old sewer connection.

Here’s the portion that was replaced recently. The black ABS piping is what fooled us thinking that we can simply connect the new house’s sewer pipe to this and we are done. Yes typically you don’t use ABS pipes for underground sewer connection, but we thought someone has already properly replaced the entire private portion of the sewer connection. Unfortunately the ABS piping ends just about where the excavator’s bucket is. After that, it is coupled to clay pipes.

I ranted in my previous post “Quality of work by city contractor” about how they poured at least 1 meter of concrete into the trench they dug in the drive way because they don’t want to properly back fill it with soil that they have trucked away. Well here, evidence of that over 1 meter thick concrete. Yes everything from the grade all the way down to the top of the hole is concrete! You just can’t break this concrete apart that easily even with an excavator.

Here’s a short video of the excavation work. You can see some broken clay piece that was dug up lying on the surface of the pile of soil. This is what caused this extra day of digging that costs me both in money and time.

Here we have the full sewer connection completed. All the old pipes are removed. Brand new 4″ SDR pipe now goes all the way from inside the house, under the foundation wall, and connects to the new 6″ SDR pipe installed by the city, with a proper clean out in the middle of the drive way.

So here’s the variety of pipes that was dug up. A portion of the sewer connection is using white PVC pipes, that was the white clean out that we disconnected a while ago. Then a portion of the sewer connection is using black ABS pipes. The clean out is the black ABS pipe in the middle. The black ABS pipe on the top is where the clean out connects to. Towards the left end of it you see a coupler which is then coupled to the clay pipe. I don’t have shots of the clay pipe since they are all broken into small pieces and most got back filled back where they came from. So just a small piece of broken clay pipe to represent a large section of sewer that remained to be in clay. And then there’s even a section of cast iron pipe down there. Talking about a big pile of mess from an old house.

Once the sewer connection is completed, the hole is back filled. This pile of broken concrete was removed from my driveway so they can excavator for the sewer connection.

Here’s the clean out on the city portion.

And remember that sink hole created by irresponsible city contractors? Well I have asked my guys, my private contractor, using my own money, to clean up after you guys!. Look, the hole is filled now, no more danger to the pedestrians walking nearby. It’s now safe and the sidewalk is not about to collapse anytime soon any more.