Cleaner: The Magazine for Drain and Sewer Cleaning, Inspection and Rehabilitation Professionals

Cleaner is a United States trade magazine and website for drain and sewer cleaning contractors. Published monthly by COLE Publishing from Eagle River, Wisconsin, it serves specialists in drain and pipe cleaning, inspection and rehabilitation, with coverage of equipment, business operations and industry news. Its official website is cleaner.com. The batch listing for this profile places it in Eagle River, Wisconsin, and its own masthead gives its address as 415 E. Wall Street in that community, with a Three Lakes post office box also shown in its print issues.

Cleaner is dedicated, in its own positioning, to sewer and drain cleaning specialists. Readers are directed to it for the latest in rodding and jetting equipment, service vans, combination sewer cleaners, hydroexcavators, inspection cameras, trenchless repair technologies, waterblasting systems and productivity-boosting tools for the field and the office. That list captures the magazine's identity: a highly focused title for contractors whose work happens in pipes, manholes and customers' premises, rather than a general construction or plumbing publication.

Publisher: COLE Publishing and Its Origins

COLE Publishing is a privately held company with offices in Wisconsin and Minnesota, headquartered in Eagle River, Wisconsin. It was founded by Bob Kendall and Pete Lawonn in June 1979. As the company's history is commonly told, Lawonn pumped septic systems and had a spare 2,000-gallon vacuum tank he needed to sell, but no effective way to market it; word of mouth and newspaper advertising did not reach the contractors who might buy it. The late John DiVall of Jay's Waste Equipment advised the pair that the industry needed a trade journal of its own.

Taking that advice, Kendall and Lawonn began publishing. The first issue of Midwest Pumper was mailed to 2,500 contractors in eight states. That title, now Pumper, became the flagship magazine for COLE Publishing. Cleaner grew within the same family, applying the model — a free, advertiser-supported trade magazine written for working contractors — to the drain and sewer cleaning segment. COLE remains owned by Bob Kendall, with Jeff Bruss listed as president, and continues to publish nine highly focused titles for the liquid waste and environmental wastewater industries.

The COLE Family of Titles

Understanding Cleaner requires seeing it among its siblings. COLE's nine titles include Pumper, Cleaner, PRO (Portable Restroom Operator), Onsite Installer, Municipal Sewer & Water, Treatment Plant Operator, Gas, Oil & Mining Contractor, digDifferent and Plumber, in print and online. Each serves a distinct trade within the wider water, wastewater and liquid waste world, and together they give COLE unusual depth across private contractors and municipal professionals alike.

Within that family, Cleaner occupies the drain and sewer cleaning niche. Pumper serves septic and liquid waste haulers, Municipal Sewer & Water serves municipal utility crews, Treatment Plant Operator serves plant operators, and Plumber serves plumbing contractors — many of whom also clean drains. Cleaner is the title that treats drain cleaning, sewer cleaning, inspection and rehabilitation as a profession in its own right, with its own equipment, economics and career paths, rather than as an add-on service line.

Who Reads Cleaner

Cleaner's subscription model defines its audience precisely. A one-year, twelve-issue subscription in the United States or Canada is free to qualified subscribers, and a qualified subscriber is any individual or company in the United States or Canada involved in the inspection, cleaning, repair and installation of residential and commercial sewer lines. Non-qualified subscriptions have been offered at a paid rate, with higher rates for other countries. In short, the magazine is written for working businesses, not for the general public.

Those businesses range from owner-operators running a single service van to larger drain cleaning and plumbing companies with multiple crews, jetting trucks and inspection vans. Readers include the owners who choose equipment and set prices, the technicians who run jetters, cutters and cameras in the field, and the office staff who schedule work, market services and keep customers. Monthly frequency, national scope and trade classification — as catalogued by media directories, which list Cleaner as a monthly, national, English-language trade magazine — match that professional readership.

Equipment Coverage: Jetting, Rodding, Cameras and Trenchless Work

Equipment is the heart of Cleaner. Its coverage follows the toolkit of the trade: mechanical rodding machines and cables, high-pressure water jetters and the nozzles that determine their cleaning performance, combination sewer cleaning trucks, hydroexcavation equipment, push cameras and crawler inspection systems, trenchless repair and lining technologies including cured-in-place pipe solutions, and waterblasting and waterjetting systems. Regular product coverage, spotlights and directories — including an annual waterblasting and waterjetting directory — help contractors compare what is available.

The magazine treats equipment selection as a business decision as well as a technical one. Articles on choosing a sewer cleaning nozzle, for example, question whether simple tier systems are as helpful as they appear, while features on video nozzles that record while they clean present inspection and cleaning as a combined productivity gain. Coverage of custom-fitted lining solutions, camera performance and jetter specification follows the same pattern: explain how the gear works, show it in a real contractor's hands, and connect it to time saved, callbacks avoided and work won.

Contractor Profiles and Field Stories

A signature of Cleaner is the contractor profile. Month after month, the magazine visits drain cleaning businesses across North America and tells how they work: how they started, what equipment they run, how they price, market and staff the business, and what they have learned. A profile of a Pasadena, California sewer and drain cleaning service examined how keeping the operation lean and controlling unnecessary costs kept profits high and customers happy. A San Diego plumbing and drains company was profiled for building a bold brand, wrapping its service trucks and running roughly 300 radio advertisements a month since April 2019 to promote drain cleaning, asking every customer how they heard about the firm.

Later profiles continue the tradition, from a New Hampshire drain cleaner describing the full spectrum of objects retrieved from pipes to companies recognised in the print issue that accompanies the online story. These profiles do work that equipment news alone cannot: they let a contractor in one state learn branding, hiring and customer-bonding lessons from a peer in another, and they give the trade a sense of shared professional identity. For many readers, the profile is the first article turned to in each issue.

Business, Law and Running the Office

Cleaner is equally a business magazine. Its issues pair field coverage with employment law, marketing, branding and office productivity. The March 2024 issue, for example, combined a cover focus on productive push cameras with an employment law article and extensive classified advertising from equipment makers and suppliers across the industry. That mix reflects the reality of the reader's day: a morning spent jetting a line, an afternoon spent hiring, quoting, invoicing or complying with the rules that govern a service business.

Advertising and classifieds are themselves part of the service. In a trade where a contractor may need a specific nozzle, cutter, camera or used truck quickly, the magazine's advertiser index and classified pages function as a marketplace connecting small businesses with specialist manufacturers who rarely advertise to consumers. The free-to-qualified circulation model depends on that marketplace: advertisers pay to reach a verified contractor audience, and contractors receive a magazine written entirely for their trade at no cost.

The WWETT Show Connection

No account of Cleaner is complete without the WWETT Show. COLE Publishing founded the annual Water & Wastewater Equipment, Treatment & Transport Show, formerly the Pumper & Cleaner Environmental Expo International and originally the Liquid Waste Haulers Show. It became the world's largest annual trade show for environmental service professionals, attracting more than 14,000 visitors from more than fifty countries, with over 564,000 square feet of exhibit space sold out at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis for the 2016 edition and exhibitor counts approaching six hundred.

In February 2016, after thirty-six years of hosting the show, COLE sold WWETT to Informa Exhibitions. Owner Bob Kendall said the decision required caring for three families — his own, COLE's employees and the community built around the show — and COLE and its magazines, including Cleaner, continued to participate in the show under the new owner. For Cleaner readers, the show remains the industry's annual gathering, where the equipment reviewed in the magazine can be seen, compared and operated in person.

Print, Digital and Video

Cleaner publishes monthly in print and continuously at cleaner.com, where readers find online exclusives, magazine issue archives, product coverage and video profiles. The video programme extends the print profiles: the July 2012 video profile series, sponsored by a nozzle manufacturer, presented featured contractors on camera years before video became standard in trade publishing. Current issues are posted online in full, organised by familiar departments — perspective, features, profiles, editor's columns and directories — preserving the magazine experience for digital readers.

The site also maintains the practical apparatus of a trade title: subscription qualification, contact information, advertiser resources and archives reaching back many years. That archive is a record of how drain cleaning professionalised — from cable machines and early cameras to high-definition inspection, trenchless rehabilitation and hydroexcavation — told through the businesses that adopted each technology.

Why Cleaner Matters

Drain and sewer cleaning is essential, unglamorous work that keeps homes, businesses and cities functioning, yet it is performed largely by small, independent contractors with few national institutions of their own. Cleaner gives that trade a national voice: a monthly forum for equipment knowledge, business practice, legal awareness and peer recognition, published by a company that has served the liquid waste industries since 1979.

For a contractor deciding on a first jetter, a growing firm weighing trenchless work, or an established business refining its brand, Cleaner provides the comparison, precedent and community that individual experience cannot. Its endurance — as a monthly print magazine, a daily-use website and the namesake, with Pumper, of the expo that became WWETT — marks it as one of the defining publications of the North American drain and sewer cleaning industry.