The riverside terraces along Lower Teddington Road sit on clay pipework that the water table has been lifting and dropping for a century. A survey plots the joints that have moved and, just as usefully, the exact point where your pipe becomes a shared lateral drain.
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 Hampton Wick
- 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 Hampton Wick
Riverside village at the foot of Kingston Bridge: a high water table, old clay and the occasional sewer surcharge when the river is up.
Hampton Wick is the village on the Middlesex bank at the foot of Kingston Bridge, a KT1 postcode on the TW side of the river. Cottages, riverside terraces and the bigger houses along the park edge all drain through clay runs laid in the Victorian build-out, and all of it sits a few feet above a river that has opinions about the water table.
That shows up in two ways. In dry weather, Hampton Wick drains behave. In a wet week the ground is saturated, the riverside sewer is working hard, and any run that is already half silted gives up. A gully that overflows only in a storm is the classic local call, and the honest answer is sometimes that the private run is fine and the public sewer is surcharging, which is Thames Water’s problem and costs you nothing. We will tell you which.
The other local theme is boundaries. Village plots are small and the old runs cross them freely, so most Hampton Wick blockages involve two households and a question about whose pipe it is. We plot the lateral drain line onto the camera footage so that question gets a factual answer. We cover Hampton Wick day and night from Teddington and Kingston.
We cover all of Hampton Wick (KT1) — from Kingston Bridge, Bushy Park, Hampton Wick station and across Kingston upon Thames, Teddington, Hampton Court. Being genuinely local means we already know what Hampton Wick's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Hampton Wick →