A snake opens a hole. Jetting cleans the whole pipe.
Out here in the box, a lot of the houses have been standing for sixty years or more, and their drains have been swallowing everything a household produces the whole time. So when your drain clogs, gets snaked, and clogs again a few months later, understand what actually happened. The snake opened a hole through the blockage, but the decades of grease, soap, and buildup lining the pipe stayed right where they were, waiting to close the gap again. It's like painting over rust. Looks fixed. Isn't.
Hydro jetting deals with the actual problem. A high pressure water stream scrubs the pipe walls clean the whole way down the line, stripping off the buildup instead of tunneling through it. For an older El Cajon drain that's been accumulating since the Speedway was still running races, that's the reset button. The line comes out about as close to new as old pipe gets, and the clog stops coming back because the thing that kept rebuilding it is gone.
That said, not every drain needs it, and you'll never be told otherwise here. Sometimes a snake genuinely solves it. The technician evaluates your actual line, explains what he's seeing in plain English, and recommends what makes sense. The decision stays yours. Always has, always will.
"We'd snaked the same line for years. One jetting and it finally stopped. Wish we'd done it sooner."
