Plumber in Ferndale, MI

Plumbing in Ferndale means working on some of the oldest houses in south Oakland County. Census figures put 42% of the city’s homes before 1940, and the median house here was built in 1945. Under those houses runs a combined sewer that carries rain and sewage in the same pipe toward the Kuhn basin, and the city itself describes that system as about 80 years old. So a slow floor drain in Ferndale is rarely just a slow drain. It can be roots in a clay lateral, a cast iron stack scaled down to half its size, or a street sewer that is full after a hard rain. We come over from Stephens Rd in Warren to find out which.

Prewar houses east and west of Woodward on an 80-year-old combined sewer

Ferndale grew mostly between 1920 and 1951, when the trolley lines on Woodward made it a bedroom town for Detroit workers. That timing shows up in the basements. Expect a cast iron stack with hub joints packed with lead and oakum, galvanized water lines patched with copper, and a clay tile lateral running out to the street. Many of these houses have footing drains tied straight into the sewer and no sump pit at all.

The sewer side is where Ferndale differs from newer suburbs. The city asks homeowners to have their sewer line surveyed, snaked and jetted regularly, because a lateral choked with roots can’t drain even when the street has room. It does a major assessment of its own lines every four years, and it warns that rains once called 100-year storms now arrive as often as annually. When the street has no room, the lowest opening in the house takes the water. That happened across the city in August 2014, and again on July 24, 2021, when nearly 2 inches fell in under 50 minutes. Our post on what causes basement backups in storms walks through the mechanics.

A third of Ferndale households rent, and 737 homes sit in two-unit buildings, where the upstairs tenant’s grease can become the downstairs tenant’s backup.

Coming across on 9 Mile Road from our Warren office

Nine Mile Road is our straight line to Ferndale. It runs west from Hoover Road, just south of our office on Stephens Rd, through Warren and Hazel Park and into downtown Ferndale. I-696 is the other way across. We schedule Ferndale visits with other south Oakland calls and tell you on the phone where yours falls.

In a prewar basement we start at the floor drain and the cleanout on the main stack, and we ask whether water has come up before and after which storms. If the line keeps clogging, a sewer camera inspection tells us whether it is roots, a sag or a broken joint. Then we look at the water service where it comes through the wall. If it looks like lead, or you can’t tell, the city’s public works department is the place to ask.

For most jobs, the office on 9 Mile matters more than the parks. Ferndale’s plumbing permit says work can’t start until the permit is issued and piping can’t be covered before it is inspected, so a sewer repair or repipe here gets planned around that inspection. Basement backups go to the Department of Public Works by phone or through the city’s SeeClickFix portal, and so does street flooding that hasn’t gone down within a few hours.

See every city we serve around Warren · More Oakland County cities · What causes basement backups during big storms · How to tell if your house still has galvanized pipes

Last updated October 25, 2026