W5 and W13 are being extended and converted street by street, and a survey before the builders arrive is the cheapest decision in the project. It maps the run, finds the joints the clay soil has moved, and shows whether the new kitchen is about to sit on a problem.
A CCTV drain survey is exactly what it sounds like: we put a camera down your drains and watch, in glorious detail, what four decades of plumbing decisions look like from the inside. To be clear, we would do this bit for free. It’s the best television in the trade. Narrating a drain run like a nature documentary (“here we see the fatberg in its natural habitat”) is a professional perk.
What you get is the useful part: a plain-English report of exactly what’s down there, where it is, and what (if anything) actually needs doing. No jargon without translation, no invented “urgent works”. If the drain is healthy, the report says so.
When a survey earns its money:
- Repeat blockages. If the same drain keeps blocking, something structural is causing it: roots, a dropped joint, scale, or a slumped section. The camera finds the cause, so you stop paying to treat the symptom.
- Buying a house in the TW area. Much of the local stock has original clay drains from the Victorian era or the 1930s. A £250 survey before exchange can save you a £3,000+ excavation after. Lenders and insurers increasingly ask for one.
- Landlords and letting agents. A dated survey report is clean evidence of drain condition between tenancies.
What it costs: a standard domestic survey runs £150–£350 depending on how much drain there is to inspect, and homebuyer surveys with a full written report start around £250. Fixed price, agreed before we start. If the survey finds something that needs fixing, the survey fee is credited against repair work we do, so you never pay twice to learn the same fact.
What to do right now in Ealing
- A survey is a planned visit, not an emergency. If water is actually backing up right now, call us about the blockage first.
- Have a rough idea where your manholes or inspection covers are. If you don't know, that's fine, finding them is part of the job.
- Buying a house? Book the survey before exchange, not after. A collapsed drain is the buyer's problem the moment you own it.
CCTV Drain Survey help, local to Ealing
The Queen of the Suburbs on heavy clay: big Victorian villas with long runs, 1930s streets in Northfields, and the Common's trees exploring all of it.
Ealing, W5 and W13, grew as the Queen of the Suburbs in the late Victorian and Edwardian years: tall red-brick villas around the Common and Haven Green, long terraces off the Uxbridge Road, 1930s semis in Northfields and West Ealing, and lately a ring of new apartment blocks around the Broadway. The ground is heavy London clay, which swells and shrinks with the seasons and has spent a century easing Ealing’s pipe joints apart.
The villas are the classic call. Big gardens, long private runs, and the plane and lime trees that line every avenue sending roots into every opened joint. A drain that blocks every year is telling you about a specific joint and a specific tree, and the camera names both. Clearing buys a season; cutting the roots and lining the joint buys a generation.
Northfields and West Ealing are the interwar story: shallow runs under long gardens, grease and silt settling on a gentle fall, and extensions going over the run without anyone looking first. We survey before building work, jet rather than rod on anything that has blocked twice, and reline rather than dig wherever a garden or a tiled path is in the way. We cover Ealing, Northfields and Hanwell at any hour from the Brentford side of our patch.
We cover all of Ealing (W5, W13) — from Ealing Broadway, Ealing Common, Walpole Park and across Acton, Hanwell, Brentford. Being genuinely local means we already know what Ealing's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Ealing →