Before a basement dig or a side-return extension in SW6, you need to know where the drain runs and what state it is in, because half the time the new kitchen is going directly on top of it. A survey is a few hundred pounds; discovering a cracked run under a finished slab is not.
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 Fulham
- 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 Fulham
Victorian terraces dug out, extended and split into flats: more kitchens per drain than almost anywhere in London.
Fulham, SW6, is Victorian terraces almost end to end, from Bishops Park up to the Fulham Road, and almost every one of them has been altered: side returns filled in, basements dug out, lofts converted, the whole house split into flats. Under all that is the original clay drain, laid in the 1880s for one family and one sink, and asked today to take four kitchens, five bathrooms and a basement shower. It copes, until it does not, and the basement flat is where it stops coping first.
So Fulham is a shared-run town. We clear from the external chamber, jet rather than rod because a hole through the grease lasts a month and a clean pipe lasts years, and we give the freeholder a plain account of what came out, because the next conversation in a converted house is always about who pays.
We also spend a lot of time here before building work. Basement digs and side-return extensions in SW6 very often go straight over the run, and a camera survey first is the cheapest insurance a Fulham renovation can buy. The riverside streets add a high water table and the odd flooded lower-ground room that turns out not to be a drain at all. We cover Fulham and Parsons Green at any hour from the Putney and Hammersmith side.
We cover all of Fulham (SW6) — from Fulham Broadway, Parsons Green, Bishops Park and across Putney, Hammersmith, Parsons Green. Being genuinely local means we already know what Fulham's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Fulham →