How NGI Trenchless and MaxLiner Are Using SpeedyLight UV CIPP to Rehabilitate Atlanta’s Aging Sewer Infrastructure

For commercial and municipal clients across Metro Atlanta, the difference between a CIPP project that ties up a building or roadway for a full day and one that wraps in a couple of hours often comes down to a single decision: how the liner gets cured. UV-cure CIPP systems like MaxLiner’s SpeedyLight+ harden the resin in minutes instead of the hours required by steam or hot-water systems. In a recent panel discussion, Steve Hyson, President of NGI Trenchless, sat down with Chad Miller and James Kicklighter from MaxLiner to talk about what’s actually behind that performance — and it isn’t just the equipment.

The MaxLiner Partnership

NGI’s relationship with MaxLiner runs deeper than a typical contractor–manufacturer arrangement. As Steve put it during the panel, the MaxLiner team has become a critical extension of NGI’s own crew — to the point that they account for “37% of all my phone contacts.” That isn’t a joke about how often things go wrong; it’s a statement about how a working CIPP trenchless pipe lining operation actually functions. CIPP is a discipline where the work happens entirely out of sight, inside live infrastructure, and field decisions have to be made quickly and correctly.

Chad Miller, who leads R&D and field training at MaxLiner, explained that he and James spend much of their year on the road across North and South America, working directly with contractors on installation technique. Their work is anchored to ASTM standards and product code approvals, with NASSCO involvement on the standards side. For NGI, that backstop matters more than any single piece of equipment — it’s what turns a manufacturer relationship into an active quality-assurance system. As Steve put it on the panel, “you can’t do it in this industry by just having a salesman that sells you a product.”

UV-Cure CIPP vs. Traditional Methods

Traditional CIPP lining cures the resin-saturated liner using steam or hot-water circulation, a process that typically runs four to six hours per shot depending on diameter and length. Ambient-cure systems take longer still and rely on the resin’s own chemistry and pot life. Both methods constrain how much work a crew can complete in a day and how aggressively they can schedule customer downtime.

SpeedyLight UV pipe lining replaces that thermal cure with LED-based ultraviolet light. Published cure speeds run up to 4.92 feet per minute — up to five times faster than steam or hot-water cure on comparable diameters. A 22-foot section of six-inch lateral can cure in roughly seven minutes once the light train begins its pull. The system uses a single-part vinyl ester resin that requires no mixing and has no pot life, removing the working-window pressure that drives a lot of CIPP errors. The resins are free of styrene and amines, which eliminates the odor complaints that historically came with steam-cured installations in occupied buildings.

The system handles pipe diameters from 2 to 24 inches, transitions, and 90-degree bends, and it’s compatible with both felt and invertible glass-fiber liners. An integrated cure-head camera lets the operator confirm cure quality in real time — directly relevant to the testing and certification rigor Chad described as the foundation of MaxLiner’s product development.

CIPP Lining in North Georgia’s Clay Soil

Metro Atlanta sits in the Piedmont geological region, where dense red clay dominates the soil profile beneath nearly every building, road, and utility easement. This clay expands when saturated and contracts during dry stretches, putting buried sewer pipes through a continuous cycle of stress that older terracotta, cast iron, and Orangeburg lines were never engineered to absorb. North Georgia receives more than 50 inches of rainfall a year, which keeps that cycle running hard.

The clay-soil problem compounds in two specific ways for Atlanta-area infrastructure. First, the seasonal soil movement separates pipe joints and cracks rigid materials, creating entry points for groundwater and tree roots. Second, the region’s dense hardwood canopy — oak, sweetgum, magnolia, pine — sends aggressive root systems toward exactly those entry points, growing into dense mats that block flow. By the time most clients call NGI, the host pipe has both structural compromise and active root intrusion.

CIPP is a strong fit for this combination because the cured liner is seamless, jointless, and bonded to the host pipe wall. There are no gaskets or mortared joints for roots to penetrate, and the new structural shell distributes soil pressure more uniformly than the original segmented pipe. The training point Chad raised on the panel matters here as much as anywhere: in clay soil with offset joints and partial collapses, the difference between a successful liner and a failed one is whether the crew understood why a particular installation choice mattered, not just how to make it. As he framed it during the discussion, plenty of contractors know how to install a liner — far fewer understand why each step is being done a specific way.

Commercial and Municipal Applications

The 2-to-24-inch diameter range that SpeedyLight+ covers maps cleanly onto the three project categories NGI handles regularly: residential laterals (typically 4–6 inches), commercial sewer rehabilitation work on mainlines and in-building stacks (4–12 inches), and municipal sanitary or stormwater mains (8–24 inches). The faster cure cycle is most operationally significant for the commercial and municipal categories, where the cost of taking infrastructure offline scales quickly — a restaurant kitchen, a hospital wing, a high-traffic stormwater inlet, a section of mainline under an arterial road.

For municipal contracts, MaxLiner’s emphasis on ASTM compliance and documented product testing translates directly into qualifying for prequalified vendor lists and meeting submittal requirements on Georgia DOT and county stormwater work. NGI’s project workflow leans on those certifications at every stage of submittal and closeout.

The training observation Chad made on the panel — that consistent technique across crew experience levels is what makes the work repeatable — is also the reason NGI continues to invest in ongoing field training. Consistent technique is what allows a crew to handle a residential lateral in the morning and a municipal stormwater main in the afternoon without redesigning the process for each job.

Schedule a Metro Atlanta Trenchless Project

NGI Trenchless has spent more than a decade rehabilitating Metro Atlanta’s aging sewer and stormwater infrastructure using trenchless methods purpose-built for North Georgia conditions. The combination of SpeedyLight UV pipe lining for fast, low-disruption installs, full-system CIPP trenchless pipe lining for structural rehabilitation, and dedicated commercial sewer rehabilitation programs covers residential, commercial, and municipal work across the region.

If you’re planning a trenchless project for a commercial property, multifamily building, or municipal system in Metro Atlanta, schedule a consultation with NGI’s team. Call (404) 860-2022 or reach out through the contact form for a site assessment.