No, not in any way that gives you a usable answer. A survey camera cannot see through standing water or past a solid blockage, so it films the face of the obstruction and stops. The drain has to be cleared first, then surveyed. Anyone who takes your money to survey a blocked drain is selling you a video of the problem you already know you have.
This is the single most common request I get, and the one I turn down most often.
Why the camera cannot see past a blockage
A CCTV drain camera works on line of sight. It has a lens and a light, and it needs clear air or clear water in front of it. A blocked drain gives it neither.
What usually happens is that the pipe upstream of the blockage has filled with standing water. The camera goes under, the lens submerges, and the picture turns brown. Even where the water is shallow, silt and debris sit on the invert and the fine detail is buried. Cracks, displaced joints and root ingress are all invisible under a layer of sludge.
So you get footage up to the blockage and nothing beyond it. The defect that caused the blockage is almost always past that point, which means the one thing you paid to see is the one thing you cannot.
The order that actually works
Clear the drain first. Survey it afterwards, if you still need to.
That second half matters. A good proportion of blockages are one-off events with an obvious cause, and once it is gone there is nothing left to investigate. Mops and cloths flushed into a system at a school in Burton upon Trent took hours of jetting with several specialist heads to shift, but the pipe underneath turned out to be sound. A survey would have told that customer nothing they did not already know once the flow came back.
A survey earns its place when the blockage keeps coming back, when you are buying the property, or when someone has told you the drain needs work and you want to see the evidence for yourself.
Before you pay anyone, work out whose drain it is
This is the part that costs me work, and I would rather say it than not.
Since 1 October 2011, under the Water Industry (Schemes for Adoption of Private Sewers) Regulations 2011, most private sewers and lateral drains in England and Wales transferred into the ownership of the water and sewerage companies. Private pumping stations followed on 1 October 2016.
The test is simple enough to apply from your own back garden. A pipe inside your boundary that serves only your property is yours. A pipe outside your boundary, or one shared with a neighbour, belongs to the water company, which across Derby, Nottingham, Burton upon Trent and most of the area I cover is Severn Trent. Blocked road gullies are a third category and belong to the county council as highway authority.
If it turns out to be theirs, they clear it and you pay nothing. Terraced and semi-detached streets are where this matters most, because those shared runs were private before 2011 and plenty of people are still paying for pipes they no longer own.
One thing worth knowing before you assume the water company is the cheap option for the pipes that are yours. They are required to charge for clearing private blockages precisely so they do not undercut independent firms like mine, so going to them for private work is not a way of getting it done for less.
If you are not sure which side of the line your blockage falls, tell me what you have got and where it is backing up. I will tell you whose it is before you have paid me anything, and if it is not mine to fix I will say so.
What each stage costs
| Work | What it involves | Price range |
|---|---|---|
| Drain clearance | High-pressure jetting or a rotary machine to remove the blockage and restore flow | £80 to £180 |
| CCTV drain survey | Camera survey of the cleared system, with a written report and a drawing of the layout | £120 to £185 |
Those are ranges rather than quotes, and they are ranges for a reason. Drainage work turns up surprises that only appear once the job has started, and a price given before anyone has seen the system is a guess dressed up as a figure.
Clearance I can usually price over the phone. There is no need for me to drive out to look at a blocked drain before quoting to unblock it, and if someone insists on a free site visit first, it is worth asking what the visit is actually for.
One thing worth saying plainly, because I hear it weekly. If you have already tried rodding it yourself and got nowhere, the problem is not that you lack a special rod. It is that rodding was never going to shift what is down there.
If you pay for a survey, insist on the report
The survey is not the video. The survey is the report.
A proper one records every observation against the WRc Manual of Sewer Condition Classification, the coding structure the industry has used since 1980 and now in its fifth edition. It comes with a drawing showing where the system actually runs. That is what a solicitor, an insurer or a builder can act on.
Here is the failure I see constantly. Someone rings me having been told their drains need relining, wanting a price. I ask for the survey report, because relining needs a diameter, a length and a location.
There is no report. The firm that surveyed it never issued one. At that point I cannot quote, and the honest answer is that they need surveying again, at a cost, which nobody wants to hear.
A survey with no report is money spent on nothing. Ask, before you book, whether a written report and a drawing are included.
Common questions
Can you survey a partially blocked drain? Sometimes. If flow is restricted rather than stopped and the water level is low enough to keep the lens clear, a camera can work. Judging that is part of the job, and it is why I ask what the drain is doing rather than what you think is wrong with it.
The drain is blocked and I am buying the house. What now? Clear it, then survey it. A house purchase drain survey on a blocked system is worthless, and it is exactly the situation where you need the report to be solid, because you may be relying on it in a negotiation.
Why can’t you just tell me what’s wrong over the phone? For clearance I often can. For anything structural I cannot, because the whole point of a survey is that nobody knows what is down there until a camera has been through it.
We lifted the grid and it’s full of water. Is that the blockage? The grid is usually the manhole cover, and a chamber full of water tells you the blockage is downstream of it, not in it. That is genuinely useful information, and worth mentioning when you call.
What if the blockage keeps coming back? That is the clearest case for a survey there is. A blockage that returns within weeks usually has a structural cause, and clearing it repeatedly without looking is just paying for the same job twice.
Booking
I cover Derby, Nottingham, Burton upon Trent, Stoke on Trent, Chesterfield, Loughborough and the surrounding towns, and have been doing drainage in this area since 2001. Clearance and surveys are usually within a few days. Repairs run to two or three weeks.
If your drain is blocked right now, ring me and describe what it is doing. If it is yours I will price the clearance on the call. If it belongs to Severn Trent I will tell you that instead, and it will not cost you anything to find out.