Sewer camera inspection

Why people put a camera down a line

The same drain keeps blocking. The most common reason and the best one. Repeat stoppages in the same spot mean a pipe condition, not debris. The camera tells you which condition, which decides whether you are buying a repair, a replacement, or a maintenance interval.

You are buying a house. A standard home inspection does not include the sewer line, and an under-slab or under-yard failure is among the most expensive defects a property can hide. On anything built before the mid-1970s, or any house with mature trees over the line, this belongs in the option period.

A hydrostatic test failed. The test proves water is escaping; it does not say where or why. The camera locates the defect so the repair can be scoped and priced.

Before trenchless work. Lining and pipe bursting both need to know the host pipe's condition, diameter, material, bends and connection points. No competent trenchless quote exists without footage.

After foundation work. Lifting a slab moves whatever is cast into and beneath it. Cast iron and clay do not always survive being moved.

To settle a dispute. Between a seller and a buyer, an owner and a builder, or two contractors with different recommendations. Footage is harder to argue with than an opinion.

What the footage actually shows

Roots. Visible as white or tan fibrous mass entering at a joint, ranging from a few hairs to a plug filling the bore. The important detail is not the roots but the opening admitting them. That is what decides whether clearing is enough.

Bellies. A section that has lost fall and holds standing water. On camera it appears as the lens submerging and the picture going murky, then clearing as the pipe rises again. Length and depth of standing water are what matter, and a good operator will call them out.

Cracks and fractures. Longitudinal splits, circumferential cracks, or missing pipe wall. Severity ranges from cosmetic to structurally failed, and it takes an experienced eye to tell them apart on a small screen.

Offsets and separations. Where two sections no longer line up, usually from soil movement. A visible step inside the pipe catches solids every time and is a frequent cause of recurring blockages.

Scale and corrosion. In cast iron, a rough tuberculated interior with the bore visibly reduced. The question is how much wall thickness remains, which footage can only partly answer.

Grease coating. A smooth pale lining over the pipe wall. Frequently the entire finding on a repeatedly blocked kitchen line.

Nothing at all. A genuinely useful result, and more common than people expect. A clean line rules out the expensive possibilities and redirects attention to fixtures, venting or usage.

How the inspection is done

Access. A cleanout downstream of the house is the normal entry. Where there is none, access may be through a roof vent or a pulled toilet, and on some older properties a cleanout has to be installed first. Establish this on the phone. It is the main variable in time and cost.

Clearing enough to see. A camera in a line full of standing water and solids shows very little. If the line is blocked, clearing usually has to happen first. On heavily coated pipe, jetting before inspection produces far more useful footage, build-up conceals cracks and separated joints extremely well.

The run. A self-levelling camera head on a flexible rod is fed through the line to the city connection or septic tank. Distance is read continuously, so every finding has a footage marker against it.

Locating from the surface. The head carries a sonde. A transmitter picked up by a receiver above ground. This is what turns a finding at 42 feet into an X on the lawn with a depth. Any repair quote depends on it, and an inspection that skips this step has left out the part that makes the footage actionable.

The recording. You should receive a copy along with a written summary. Insist on it. It is the document that supports an insurance claim, a price negotiation, a builder warranty conversation, or a second opinion.

Reading the result without being sold to

Camera footage is persuasive, which is precisely why it deserves a sceptical eye. A close-up of a root ball looks alarming on any screen. The questions that matter are quieter.

Where is it, in feet, and how deep? A defect at 8 feet in the front yard and the same defect at 46 feet under a driveway are entirely different repairs at entirely different prices.

How many defects, and are they the same kind? One cracked joint is a spot repair. Six separations along a run mean the pipe is failing generally, and repairing one of them is not a solution.

Is the pipe still doing its job? Some findings are genuine defects that will not cause a problem for many years. Minor scale in cast iron, a shallow belly holding an inch of water, a hairline crack with no infiltration, worth documenting, not worth panicking about. A good report distinguishes urgent from monitor.

What is the material and how old? Cast iron, clay, Orangeburg, PVC and ABS have very different expected lives, and the same visible defect means something different in each.

What a camera cannot tell you

It is worth being clear about the limits, because they explain why a camera is sometimes recommended alongside another test rather than instead of it.

It does not measure whether the line holds water. A camera shows visible defects on the inside surface. A hairline crack or a joint leaking only under load can be invisible on footage. That is what a hydrostatic test is for, and on a house with foundation concerns the two are complementary rather than alternatives.

It cannot see remaining wall thickness. Cast iron can look acceptable inside while being substantially thinned. The interior view is one input into a judgement about remaining life, not a measurement of it.

It cannot see beyond a blockage or a collapse. If the head cannot pass, everything downstream is unknown. Sometimes clearing first and re-running is the answer; sometimes the fact that it will not pass is itself the finding.

It shows one day. A line that looks fine in September with dry soil can behave differently in spring after clay has swelled. Marginal findings sometimes deserve a repeat inspection rather than an immediate repair.