Originally posted by @Jeremy Brown:
We had one done a few months back. They replaced between the clean out at the edge of the house to the clean out by the street.
In our case, we were getting repeated clogs. A plumber suggested the problem was under the sidewalk. The county came out for free to check. There was no clean out near the street, so they installed one - also, free. They said the problem was between there and the house. So, we did the trenchless, pipe bursting method. It didn't seem cheap at the time, but was under $2k.
Make sure you know what method they're going to use for that price. For bursting and running a new pipe, that seems good. In our case, they offered to dig and patch, since we had a break and offset joint in the middle. I don't know if that's an option in your situation. There's also a cheap option where they just pull a liner. It makes the sewer line narrower and in my research looked like the least-desirable method. Digging out the whole line seems like a mess. For us, it was under the driveway, so we didn't really consider it.
Wow I had to google pipe bursting! Pretty neat stuff, I believe this guy was going to be digging with a mini excavator. It's just going across the yard with no obstacles. Will have to ask some more questions tomorrow. He's supposed to go back and check it again tomorrow morning. Originally he was thinking the line ran out the back of the house where there was clearly a exposed piece of sewer pipe with a break in it. After looking into it I recalled there used to be a shop with a toilet directly behind the house.
My theory is the main drain line goes through the front yard to the curb. I'm hoping the main line is just clogged up which is pushing it back to the old abandoned line going to where the toilet was in the shed. The shed toilet line had a big visible break likely from when the shed was demo'd.
Hopefully we may be able to dodge the bullet.
