In SW14 a camera run is usually the first useful thing anyone has done to the drain in a century. We regularly find a displaced joint under a lawn that has been quietly backing up for years, and the footage tells the owner, the neighbour and sometimes the insurer exactly where the fault is.
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 East Sheen
- 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 East Sheen
Edwardian avenues with long rear gardens and private runs that nobody has looked at since the house was built.
East Sheen is Edwardian suburbia at its most settled: tree-lined avenues between Upper Richmond Road West and the Sheen Gate of Richmond Park, with long rear gardens and houses that have been quietly extended, re-plumbed and re-roofed for a hundred years. The drains, mostly, have not been touched. They are original clay runs that leave the back of the house, travel the length of the garden and meet the sewer under the road, and twenty metres of century-old pipe gives a blockage plenty of places to hide.
Root ingress is the local speciality. The gardens here are full of mature fruit trees, limes and the occasional willow, and every one of them has found the drain at some point. The pattern is familiar: a slow bath, then a gurgle from the downstairs toilet, then one wet morning the outside gully lifts its lid. Clearing it buys a year; lining the entry point buys a generation.
Sheen also has a lot of side returns and kitchen extensions built over the original run, which means access is often through a single chamber near the back door. We carry the kit for long reaches and tight access, and a camera survey here is usually the first time anyone has seen what the house has been standing on. We cover all of SW14 from Mortlake to the park, around the clock.
We cover all of East Sheen (SW14) — from Sheen Common, Upper Richmond Road West, Palewell Common and across Mortlake, Richmond, Barnes. Being genuinely local means we already know what East Sheen's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in East Sheen →