Where does the city's pipe stop and mine start?
At the meter. The utility owns the main in the street and the meter in the box near your curb. From that meter's outlet to your foundation, the line is yours — and so is the repair bill.
That surprises people. It's typically thirty to eighty feet of buried pipe crossing a yard nobody has dug up since the house went in, and in Red Oak and Waxahachie that yard is Blackland Prairie clay — it swells when wet and shrinks hard when it isn't. A service line spends decades being pushed and pulled by the ground around it. Joints give up. That's the usual story behind a leak with no freeze and no obvious cause.
Why is part of my yard wet when nothing's running?
Because something is running: under the grass, at line pressure, around the clock. A service line leak doesn't stop between showers the way a fixture leak does.
The tells, roughly in the order people notice them: a water bill that jumps with nothing about the household changed, one stripe of grass green into a dry August, soft ground near the meter, pressure dropping off for no good reason. Go read the meter with every tap shut off. If the dial is still turning, you've found your answer without a plumber.
What's actually wrong out there?
Five things account for most of what we see.
| What you notice |
Usually means |
What the fix looks like |
| Green stripe in a dry yard |
Service line leak between meter and house |
Locate, then spot repair or replace the run |
| Spigot drips with a hose on it |
Vacuum breaker on the bib outlet |
Screw-on part, replaced in minutes |
| Spigot drips with nothing attached |
Valve seat, a foot inside the wall on a frost-free |
Whole bib comes out as a unit |
| Water spraying off the side of the house |
Backflow assembly split or relief valve dumping |
Rebuild or replace the assembly |
| Sewage surfacing in the yard |
Broken or blocked sewer lateral |
Camera the line, then cleanout or excavation |
Is this my plumbing or my sprinkler system?
Here's the limit on what we do. Irrigation past the backflow device is a separately licensed trade in Texas; a plumbing license doesn't cover it, ours included.
In practice: the water line feeding the system and the backflow assembly are our work. Broken heads, cut laterals, leaking valve boxes and dead controllers are an irrigator's. We'd rather say that here than after we're standing in your yard.
Do I need a permit to add an outside cleanout?
Not on its own. Red Oak and Waxahachie don't require a separate permit to put an exterior cleanout in.
Part of something bigger — a failed sewer lateral, a repipe — and it's covered by that job's permit. Worth adding if you don't have it. Without one, clearing a main line blockage means going through a roof vent or pulling a toilet. With one, it's a drain cleaning call instead of an excavation.