The Wandle valley is wet ground and the old clay under Wandsworth's Victorian streets has moved with it. A survey finds the displaced joint behind a repeat blockage, and in a converted house it also plots where your pipe becomes a shared lateral drain and stops being your bill.
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 Wandsworth
- 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 Wandsworth
A river valley town: the Wandle, a riverside full of new blocks, and Victorian cottages in the Tonsleys on clay runs that predate all of it.
Wandsworth, SW18, runs from the Thames at Wandsworth Town up the Wandle valley to Earlsfield and across to the Common, and the drains come in three distinct generations. The Tonsleys and the streets around the Common are Victorian cottages on original clay. Southfields and Earlsfield add Edwardian houses and 1930s blocks. The riverside has filled with large new developments whose drains are plastic, communal and, for the first few years, full of builders’ leftovers.
New-block calls usually come from a managing agent at an awkward hour: the car park gullies or a ground-floor unit backing up because grout, wipes and a traffic cone’s worth of debris have met at the one shallow bend in the communal run. We clear it, film it and hand over a report that makes the snagging conversation with the developer very short.
Old-house calls are about shallow waste runs and shared clay. Victorian cottages have had bathrooms added wherever they fitted, and the long, nearly flat waste pipe to the stack blocks on hair and wipes long before the drain outside does. The Wandle valley is wet ground, the clay has moved, and the camera finds the joint behind a repeat blockage and plots where your pipe becomes a shared lateral drain. We cover Wandsworth, Earlsfield and Southfields around the clock.
We cover all of Wandsworth (SW18) — from Wandsworth Town, Southside, the Tonsleys and across Putney, Earlsfield, Southfields. Being genuinely local means we already know what Wandsworth's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Wandsworth →