Home sewer, septic and water lines in metro Atlanta — one callHOME SEWER, SEPTIC & WATER LINES — ONE CALL.

It sounds like something every owner would know, but it is easy to buy a house without anyone saying it out loud. It matters, because a septic problem and a sewer problem look alike from inside the house and are fixed in completely different ways.

**1. Read the water bill.** A sewer customer is usually billed for sewer service along with water. No sewer charge on the bill is a strong hint you're on septic. A private well and no water bill at all usually means septic too.

**2. Look for lids and a cleanout.** A septic tank has one or two lids, sometimes on green or black plastic risers, and Georgia rules say a tank should sit about 10 ft from the foundation. A sewer lateral has a cleanout, a capped pipe near the house and, in Gwinnett, often a second one at the right-of-way. Some septic houses have a cleanout too, so lids are the better tell.

**3. Check the county records.** Septic systems are permitted by county Environmental Health: GNR Health for Gwinnett, Newton and Rockdale, the Northeast Health District for Walton and Morgan, and DeKalb Public Health. A permit on file answers the question. Gwinnett has also put digitized septic location records in its public GIS.

**4. Ask the utility.** The water and sewer provider can tell you whether your address has a sewer account and whether a main runs past the lot.

**5. Look at the neighborhood.** Older in-town streets in Covington, Conyers and Monroe are largely sewered; rural roads around Oxford, Mansfield, Social Circle and Jersey are largely septic. Gwinnett alone, per the county, has an estimated 30% of its population on septic. Neighborhood patterns are a clue, not proof, so confirm with one of the steps above.

Picture a house from the curb. Clean water comes in from the utility's main, through the meter box near the street, and up a buried service line to the house. Used water leaves the other way: down through the building drain, out past the foundation, and into the ground again. On a sewered lot it runs through the lateral to a main in the street. On a septic lot it runs to a tank in the yard, then to a distribution box, then out into the drain field trenches.

Everything a homeowner calls "the plumbing" inside the walls is only the middle of that route. The expensive failures happen at the ends, underground, where you can't see them: a root-split clay joint in the lateral, a baffle rotted off inside the tank, a field line crushed by a truck, a service line leaking into the red clay for months before the bill jumps.

Those failures don't respect trade boundaries either. A backed-up toilet might be a full tank, a broken inlet pipe, or a field that has stopped taking water. A company that only pumps tanks, or only snakes drains, can only fix its piece. We work the whole run. We pump and inspect tanks, scope lines, repair and replace laterals, water lines and drain fields, and do the excavation all of it takes. When you call us, the diagnosis isn't limited to the one thing a single-trade company happens to sell.