About Chinook Trenchless
Sewer and water lines replaced without opening your yard. Locally owned, insured, and working across Calgary and the surrounding municipalities.
What we do
Chinook Trenchless works on the buried line between a building and the main. Sewer laterals relined or replaced from two small access pits instead of a trench across the yard, water services pulled through the same way, drains cleared and jetted, and a camera down the line before any of it is quoted.
It is a narrow trade on purpose. A general plumber handles everything from the fixture back to the stack and is the right and cheaper call for most of what goes wrong in a house. The part that starts at the foundation wall and ends at the property line — where you cannot see it, cannot reach it, and cannot tell from inside what it is made of — is the whole of what we do.
Why it exists as a business
Almost every buried-line decision is made on incomplete information, and it is usually expensive. A homeowner is told their line needs replacing, has no way to check, and either pays or does not. There is no second opinion available, because the second opinion costs another callout and arrives with the same equipment and the same incentive.
The answer is not to be trusted more. It is to hand over the footage. We put a camera down the line, you watch the screen, and you keep the file. If our reading of it is wrong, somebody else can tell you so from the same recording — and if we are not willing to be checked that way, the reading was not worth much.
How we work
Nothing is quoted from a description. What is in the ground decides what can be done to it, and what is in the ground is not knowable from the year on the title or from a photograph of a wet floor drain. The camera goes first, every time.
Method follows the pipe, not the truck. A sound line with bad joints wants a liner; a collapsed one wants replacing; a short shallow run under bare lawn is frequently cheaper to dig than to mobilise trenchless equipment for. Every method we use has its own page, and every one of those pages lists what that method cannot do. The comparison, with the case for digging.
And we tell people not to buy. In the communities built since the 1980s the buried line is usually plastic with decades left in it, and a blockage there is a blockage. Saying so costs one job and earns the next call, which is the only sustainable way to run this trade in a city where half the housing stock does not need us.
What you get on every job
- A camera survey before anything is quoted, watched live, handed over as a file you keep rather than a clip you were shown.
- A written condition report naming what the pipe is, where the defect is, and what each option would and would not fix.
- Alberta One-Call locates cleared before anything is opened, and pit positions set where they do the least damage to what is on the surface.
- A phone call while the pit is still open if what is down there is not what the camera suggested — not a note about it afterwards.
- The same camera back down the finished line, so you see the before and the after rather than a description of them.
Credentials
A new company, said plainly
Chinook Trenchless was founded in 2026. You will not find a job count, a testimonial wall or a star rating here, because we are not going to manufacture one. Both pages that would normally carry them say so instead.
What we will not do
Every one of these is a way this trade routinely goes wrong for a property owner.
Quote a line we have not seen
What the pipe is made of, where it has actually failed and what is buried alongside it are the three facts that decide the job, and none of them is visible from inside the house.
Speak for the municipality
Permits, fees and inspection sequence belong to the authority having jurisdiction. We name the authority for your address and confirm the requirement with them, rather than stating it on their behalf.
Tell you what your policy covers
Whether a backup is covered is between you and your insurer. We will document what we found in a form your adjuster can read, and stop there.
Sell the full-length answer to a one-spot problem
One bad joint with sound pipe either side of it is a patch. Replacing the whole run because that is what the equipment in the truck does is the most common way to overspend on this work.
Where we work
Calgary and the surrounding municipalities. What is buried changes enormously between them, and so does what the honest recommendation turns out to be.
Something not draining?
Tell us what it is doing, roughly how old the house is, and whether it has done it before. That is enough to tell you whether this is a cleaning or a camera job.