A homeowner had a video of his pipe and a theory about it. The footage, he told Alex Garcia, seemed to show a crack.
“Would you mind if I put my own camera down there?” Garcia says he asked. The man didn’t mind at all.
What Garcia’s camera showed was not a crack. A chunk of the pipe was missing. “You couldn’t tell from the other video,” he says. He walked the homeowner through the footage himself: “This is the whole thing that’s missing.” The man told him four companies had already been out to look at the line, Garcia says, and that his footage was by far the best. Then he told Garcia to go ahead with the work.
Garcia started Mountain West Hydro Jetting & Sewer Maintenance in Kaysville in 2026 with a co-owner, Jacob. The company is young, and the camera job is the story Garcia tells first. Two ideas run through the way he describes the work: show people the inside of their own pipe, and leave the place cleaner than he found it.
“The quality of our camera is ridiculous,” he says.
The company puts a hydro jetting machine and a sewer camera on every truck. The jetter runs at 3,850 psi through a 500-foot hose. The camera’s self-leveling head travels 200 feet into a line and records what it sees. The point, as the company lays it out on its site, is to diagnose and clear a line on the first visit, with the customer looking at the same picture the crew is.
When the partners shop for gear, Garcia says, the question is the same each time. “This is going to be the best equipment for us because we’re able to give better quality work to other people.”
He is precise about what kind of company it is. “We’re not plumbers,” he says. “We’re just the drain cleaning people.” Snaking, jetting and camera work are the core of it. He spent about two years cleaning drains for different outfits before Mountain West, but most of what he knows came from his father, who has worked in the trade for more than 20 years and passed along his tips and tricks. Garcia calls him “like a wizard on a snake.” A friend who owns a larger plumbing company in West Valley pushed the two partners to start a drain company of their own and helped them as they got going.
The company’s Utah licenses reach past the drain. They cover underground sewer, storm drain and water pipelines, along with excavation and concrete and asphalt work. If a main line is broken in front of a house, the crew can dig it up and replace it.
That is where Garcia says the standard gets tested. “We can dig up your yard,” he says, and when the crew puts everything back, the goal is to make it look “like we were never there.”
“I really take pride in that,” he says.
The partners split the work along a plain line. Garcia handles the labor; Jacob handles the business side, and they share the big decisions. When Garcia decides they need a truck or a new piece of equipment, he makes the case to Jacob, who says go get it or wait. “He’s been running everything,” Garcia says.
Most of the work is residential, across Davis, Weber and Salt Lake counties. The company has also taken on commercial jobs, including work at an administration building at the University of Utah.
One homeowner who had a clogged kitchen drain cleared noticed the small things: the technician explained what he was finding as he worked, stayed patient when the job ran long and put the garden hose away before he left.
Garcia says the cleanup applies to every visit, even one that is only a snake or a camera run. He wants the house to look better than when he arrived, and he wants the people the company hires to work the same way.
“This is a drain cleaning company,” he says. “We’re going to be clean.”