Our 100 year old, plus or minus, house is on a hill. In the spring of 2011 the sanitary sewer system backed up thru the basement toilet, creating a very difficult situation that required special cleaning & sterilizing. Investigation disclosed that the sewer line, comprising old terracotta pipes were crushed in some places & clogged by root growth in others. This sewer line runs down hill, from the back of our house, thru land belonging to the adjacent church, & finally connects to a municipal sewer main in the next street over, on the other side of our back-side neighbor and the adjacent above mentioned church.
Our usual plumbing, heating & HVAC contractor proposed an elaborate, very costly solution, whereby a new underground sewer line would be installed, running uphill the hook into the municipal sewer main in the street in front of our house; because of the uphill slope it would require a pump.
AJ Oldroyd said that was nonsense; much better, much less costly, to simply replace the old sewer line, running downhill, with new PVC pipes that meet building code specs -- plus no need to depend on any kind of pumping system. Cost per RFP was 60% of the first-described and alternative solution.
Then a problem: As previously noted, part of the sewer line ran thru a portion of the church's land lying between the church building '"7 the property of our back-door neighbor. Our sewer line was under an unkempt 15'-wide strip of church land, clogged with wild growth of untended trees, bushes & weeds, immediately adjacent to our neighbor's driveway. The trustees of the Congregational Church were not very Christian -- smug, ungenerous, uncooperative. Wanted a contract that, for me to vet with my attorney would cost me $5,000+. And they wanted money deposited in escrow for any damages that might be incurred. AJ Oldroyd solved the problem. He "scoped" the portion of the old terracotta line running under the church property & determined that, while it was heavily invaded by root growth, it was sufficiently intact to be continued in service. He installed a new sewer line, running from our house to the edge of the church's property, at which point he installed a "clean-out" access. Then he roto- rooted the roots out of the old pipes under the church property. At one point, the roto-rooter hit a snag & stopped. Oldroyd then had to go onto my neighbor's driveway, reach over onto church property, dig down, & remove a rock. The church people "hit the roof." I received a letter mentioning an intended law suit on account of having been warned that, absent their proposed legal contract and escrow, I had nonetheless caused an entering on and work on their property. (In fact, I was totally unaware that Oldroyd had either hit that snag or done anything about it.) Oldroyd solved the problem two ways: 1) he demonstrated that the only damage was to certain weeds. 2) he told them that, inasmuch as he had also contracted directly with the church to do some very extensive work on their property, if they could show they had been damaged by what he did on our behalf, he would do all of the work he had contracted to do for the church for free. That shut them up.