In a conservation area the camera is not optional. Nobody is digging a trench through a Petersham garden on a guess, and the footage is also what the insurer wants when a period house claims for a collapsed run. We map the whole line, including where it leaves your boundary.
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 Petersham
- 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 Petersham
A Georgian village on the flood plain: conservation-area gardens, two centuries of pipework and a water table that sits just under the lawn.
Petersham is the village in TW10 between Richmond Hill and Ham, Georgian houses and Victorian cottages set beside the meadows that the Thames floods on purpose. It is one of the prettiest places we work and, from a drain’s point of view, one of the dampest. The water table here is never far below the grass, and it rises every winter into the backfill around pipes that were laid before anyone had heard of a camera.
The result is silt. A Petersham run with a dropped joint, and most have one by now, lets fine sediment in each wet season until the bore closes. Clearing it is straightforward. Stopping it means finding the joint, and on camera the entry point is usually obvious: a lip of clay with a little delta of silt behind it.
Everything we do here is done with the garden in mind. Surveys run through the existing chambers, repairs are relining rather than digging, and the footage is kept for the insurer, because period houses on a flood plain do end up claiming. We cover Petersham, Ham and the Richmond Hill slopes at any hour, and we promise not to put a van on the meadow.
We cover all of Petersham (TW10) — from Petersham Meadows, Richmond Park (Petersham Gate), River Lane and across Richmond, Ham, Richmond Hill. Being genuinely local means we already know what Petersham's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Petersham →