Sewer pipe lining guide
Sewer Pipe Lining Equipment: The Machines Behind a Cured-in-Place Liner
There is no single pipe lining machine. A lining crew brings a chain of equipment, each piece for one step, and what is parked in the driveway tells you a great deal about what kind of liner is going in and how carefully. This page walks the chain in order.
Inspection first: crawler cameras and locators
Before any sewer pipe lining equipment comes off the truck, a camera goes down the pipe. On a house lateral that is a push camera, a rigid rod with a self-leveling color head and a sonde that a locator on the surface can find and read for depth. On a main it is a tracked crawler with a pan-and-tilt head, lights, a laser or sonar profiler on larger jobs, and a reel of several hundred feet of cable, operated from a van. A lateral-launch crawler carries a second small camera that can be pushed up each house connection from the main. The recording from this pass is coded, in municipal work under the NASSCO Pipeline Assessment Certification Program, and it is the document that decides whether the pipe is a lining candidate and what thickness the liner needs.
Cleaning: jetters, cutters and descalers
A trailer or truck-mounted hydro jetter pumps water at 3,000 to 4,000 psi on residential units and higher on municipal units through a nozzle that pulls itself up the pipe with rear-facing jets and cuts with forward ones. Root nozzles, chain-flail heads and carbide descaling heads spin on the same hose to cut roots, chew scale off cast iron and grind down a small offset. Municipal cleaning adds vacuum trucks to remove the debris at the downstream manhole. A liner bonds to clean pipe and inflates only to the bore the cleaning left, so this stage is not skipped on a job that is being done properly, and a second camera pass follows it.
Wet-out: rollers, vacuum and refrigerated trucks
Wet-out is the saturation of the tube with resin. On a residential job it happens on site: resin and hardener are mixed in measured batches, poured into the tube, and worked through the felt by hand and then by a roller table whose gap is set to the design thickness, forcing air out and resin into every fiber. Municipal felt liners are wet out in a plant under vacuum, which pulls the air from the felt before the resin is drawn in, and the saturated liner is delivered in a refrigerated truck to hold the cure until it is in the pipe. Glass liners for ultraviolet cure arrive factory-impregnated in light-tight sleeves and need no wet-out on site, which is one of the reasons UV crews are small and fast. The sewer pipe liners page covers the tubes and resins themselves.
Installation: inversion drums, inverters and winches
The piece most people mean by a lining machine is the inversion unit. The wet liner is loaded into a drum or a pressure vessel, one end is folded back over a nozzle and clamped, and compressed air or a column of water from a scaffold turns the liner inside out into the pipe, so that the resin-soaked side ends up pressed against the pipe wall and the coated side becomes the new smooth bore. That is inversion, the method in ASTM F1216, and the unit ranges from a hand-cart drum that fits through a doorway, for laterals and under-slab work, to a truck-mounted inverter for mains. The alternative is pull-in-place, in ASTM F1743: a winch at the far access draws the liner through the pipe on a cable, and then a separate calibration tube is inverted inside it, or air is applied directly, to press it against the wall. Pull-in is how glass liners are installed, because they are too stiff to invert, and it is common for short sectional repairs. A pressure gauge on the inversion unit and a log of the pressure held through the cure are part of the record on any specification job.
Cure: boilers, steam generators and UV light trains
The resin decides the cure equipment. An ambient-cure epoxy on a short lateral needs nothing but time and the pressure held inside the liner. A hot-water cure uses a boiler, often diesel-fired on a trailer, circulating water through the inflated liner for several hours while thermocouples at the ends report the temperature at the liner wall. A steam cure uses a steam generator, is faster, and needs a controlled cool-down so that the liner does not shrink away from the host. An ultraviolet cure uses a light train, a chain of UV lamps on a small carriage with its own camera, drawn through the inflated glass liner by a winch at a speed set for the liner thickness, with the speed, lamp output and liner temperature logged as the cure record. Municipal specifications typically require that log, and on hot-water and steam jobs a chart of temperature against time. On a residential job the equivalent is the installer telling you the cure method and how long it will take before the line is back in service, which for most laterals is the same day.
Reinstatement: robotic cutters
A cured liner covers every branch that joined the pipe. A robotic cutter reopens them: a camera-guided crawler with a rotating grinding head, operated from the surface, that finds the dimple where each connection was and cuts it open from inside the liner, through to the branch pipe, without digging. Small-diameter cutters for laterals run on a push cable and are operated from a laptop; municipal cutters ride on a crawler and can reinstate dozens of house connections on a reach. Reinstatement is the step that produces the most residential complaints, because a missed branch leaves a fixture with no drain and an off-center or ragged cut catches debris. The final camera pass should show each reinstatement clean and full-bore, and the installer should tell you before the job how many there are.
Supporting equipment
- Bypass pumps and plugs to hold back and route flow around a main during the cure, with a standby pump; a residential lateral is simply not used for the day.
- Compressors and air dryers for inversion and inflation pressure.
- Lateral plugs and packers to keep the liner from blowing into a branch or a manhole.
- Sectional repair kits: a short fiberglass sleeve, a carrier packer and an inflation line, for a sectional point repair where one joint is the whole problem.
- Spray and brush-coating rigs for the epoxy coatings used in small-diameter and potable work, which are a different product from a structural liner.
- Spin-cast rigs, a centrifugal spray head on a winch-drawn sled fed by a mortar pump, for the large-diameter and manhole work described on the spin-cast lining page.
What the rig tells you about the installer
An installer who arrives with a camera, a jetter, an inversion drum, a hot-water or ambient-cure setup and a cutter is equipped to line a house lateral properly, and most of the verified installers on this site run exactly that on a dedicated truck. An installer who arrives with a camera and a snake and proposes a liner is subcontracting the lining, which is fine if you know it. A plumber with none of this equipment can only sell the repair he can perform, which is why two contractors looking at the same footage sometimes propose two different repairs. A municipal contractor bidding ultraviolet work owns or leases a light train and buys pre-impregnated glass liner, and the specification will ask for the cure logs the train produces. The municipal pipe lining page covers what public-works specifications require of the equipment and its records, and the sewer pipe lining cost page explains why the fixed cost of bringing all of it to a 40-foot line is what makes short runs expensive per foot.
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Equipment questions
What is a sewer pipe lining machine?
People usually mean the inversion unit: a drum or pressure vessel that holds the resin-saturated liner and uses compressed air or a column of water to turn it inside out into the pipe. But lining takes a chain of machines: a camera crawler, a hydro jetter, a wet-out table or vacuum impregnation unit, the inversion drum, a boiler, steam generator or UV light train for the cure, and a robotic cutter to reopen the branch connections afterward.
How is a liner pushed into the pipe?
It is not pushed. In inversion, under ASTM F1216, the liner is attached to the inversion unit and air or water pressure turns it inside out down the pipe, so the resin side ends up against the pipe wall. In pull-in-place, under ASTM F1743 and F2019, the liner is drawn through the pipe with a winch cable from the far access point and then inflated with air or a calibration tube until it presses against the wall.
How is a sewer liner cured?
Ambient-cure epoxy hardens on its own over a few hours. Hot-water cure circulates water heated by a boiler through the inflated liner. Steam cure uses a trailer-mounted steam generator and is faster. Ultraviolet cure draws a train of UV lamps through a glass-reinforced liner at a logged speed. The cure method follows the resin, and the temperature or light record is part of a municipal job's documentation.
What is a robotic cutter?
A camera-guided crawler with a rotating cutting head that travels inside the cured liner and grinds open each branch connection the liner covered, from inside the pipe, without digging. Reinstatement is the step that most often goes wrong on residential work, so the cutter and the operator matter as much as the liner.
How much does pipe lining equipment cost for a contractor?
A residential inversion setup with a drum, a wet-out roller table, a small hot-water unit, a cutter and a camera starts in the tens of thousands of dollars and is commonly built out to a dedicated truck in the low six figures. Municipal steam-cure rigs and ultraviolet light trains with their pre-impregnated glass liners are larger investments, which is why most UV work is done by specialized contractors.
Can I rent a pipe lining machine and line my own sewer?
Inversion units and small kits are sold and occasionally rented, but the resin chemistry, the thickness design, the cure control and the reinstatement are where lining jobs fail, and a liner cured badly is harder and more expensive to remove than the original pipe was to repair. Most jurisdictions also require a licensed plumber or contractor to pull the permit. This is not a weekend project.