Can I rent a jetter and do this myself?

You can rent small electric units, and for a short branch line with a known simple blockage some people manage fine. Be aware of what you are taking on. Pressurised hose in a confined line is genuinely dangerous if the nozzle reverses toward you, it is easy to damage older pipe by using the wrong nozzle or too much pressure, and without a camera you are working entirely blind on the one thing that most determines whether jetting is appropriate at all. On a main lateral it is not a sensible DIY job.

My plumber says snaking is all I need. Are they wrong?

Not necessarily, and it depends entirely on what is in your line. If they have run a camera and seen a discrete blockage in otherwise clean pipe, snaking is the correct and cheaper call and you should take it. If they are recommending it without having looked, they are guessing, and the reasonable question is what the inside of the pipe actually looks like. Either answer is fine; the absence of an answer is the problem.

How often would I need jetting compared to snaking?

That is rather the point of the comparison. A cabled line whose underlying problem is wall deposit tends to come back on a cycle of months to a couple of years, because the channel refills. A properly jetted line with no structural defect is typically good for several years, and the sensible follow-up is a camera check rather than automatic re-cleaning. If someone proposes annual jetting for a healthy residential line, ask to see the footage justifying it.

Does jetting use a lot of water?

A meaningful amount, though less than most people assume, and it is recirculated through the machine rather than simply run to waste. A typical residential job uses roughly what a long shower does. In drought-conscious Southern California that is a fair question to ask, and the counterweight is that a line cleaned properly once uses less water overall than the same line cleared repeatedly, each clearance involving its own flushing.

Hydro Jetting vs Snaking: Which One Your Line Actually Needs

The short version

A drain cable punches a hole through a blockage. A hydro jetter scours the pipe wall back to bare material. If your problem is an object, you want the cable. If your problem is a coating, only the jetter will do anything lasting.

Nearly all the frustration people have with drain companies comes from this single distinction being skipped.

What a cable actually does

A drain machine feeds a flexible steel cable into the line and spins it. On the end is a cutting head or a retrieval tip. The cable finds the obstruction, chews or hooks through it, and flow returns.

It is genuinely excellent at certain things and there is no snobbery about it here. If a child has posted something into a toilet, a cable retrieves it. If there is a dense hair plug just past a shower trap, a cable clears it in minutes for a fraction of what any other approach would cost. If a root mass needs breaking up quickly at two in the morning to stop a house flooding, a cable is the fastest route to a functioning drain tonight.

What it cannot do

A cable interacts with the centre of the pipe, not the wall. Against a uniform layer of grease and mineral deposit lining the whole circumference, it bores a tunnel, polishes the sides of the tunnel, and leaves the layer in place. Flow returns, which is why it feels like a repair, and the tunnel closes at whatever rate your household refills it.

A cable restores flow. A jetter restores the pipe. Those sound similar and cost very differently over five years.

What a jetter actually does

A jetter pushes a nozzle up the line on a high-pressure hose. Most jets point backward, so the reaction pulls the nozzle forward while the spray works the wall through the full circumference. Loosened material is carried downstream to the sewer on the flow rather than dragged back through your house.

The finishing condition is different in kind. After a cable you have a channel. After a jetter you have the bore the pipe was manufactured with, which is why the interval before the next problem is measured in years rather than seasons.

Where a jetter is the wrong tool

It is not universally superior and anyone claiming otherwise is selling. On a collapsed section, jetting is unsafe and risks losing a nozzle in the line, which converts a repair into a larger excavation. On a bellied line, it cleans beautifully and achieves nothing durable, because standing water is a grade problem. On badly thinned cast iron, aggressive jetting can find every weak spot at once. And for one object near a fixture, it is expensive overkill.

How to tell which one you need

You can get most of the way there from the symptoms before anyone visits.

Signs it is an object, so use a cable

One fixture affected, everything else normal
It happened suddenly, with no gradual decline beforehand
You know roughly what went down there
The fixture is upstairs or well away from the main line
It has never happened before on this drain

Signs it is a coating, so use a jetter

The same line has been cleared more than once in two years
Several fixtures are slow at the same time
Gurgling from one fixture when another drains
The lowest fixture in the house backs up first
It has been getting gradually worse over seasons, not suddenly
The house is in Murrieta and nobody has ever cleaned the wall

That last point is less glib than it sounds. Murrieta water runs around twelve grains per gallon, which is very hard, and every year of that leaves deposit inside the drain line. Coating problems are simply more common here than in soft-water regions, and a diagnostic habit imported from elsewhere will under-call them.

The sequence that actually makes sense

In an active emergency, with sewage rising, the order is not controversial. Get flow restored by whatever is fastest, which is usually a cable. Stop the damage first.

The mistake is stopping there. Once the house is functioning again, a camera pass tells you whether you experienced an isolated event or the latest instalment of a narrowing line. If it is the latter, jetting properly at a time of your choosing is far cheaper than the next emergency callout at midnight.

So: cable to stop the flood tonight, camera to find out what happened, jetter if the wall is the problem. Anyone who does step one and leaves without offering step two is not in a position to tell you whether you need step three.

A note on cost over time

Compared per visit, cabling wins easily. Compared across five years on a line whose real problem is the wall, it usually does not, because you are buying the same temporary result repeatedly while the underlying bore continues to reduce.

The honest framing is that these are not competing products. They are different repairs for different faults, and the expensive mistake is not choosing wrongly between them once. It is choosing the cheap one four times for a fault it cannot address.