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Guide

When a Sewer Camera Is Worth Paying For

Not every drain needs a camera. Knowing which ones do saves you money on the ones that do not.

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Drains and sewers only

Not a plumbing company with a drain page. This is the whole job.

A camera on recurring calls

If a drain has backed up before, guessing at it twice is not a plan.

Northern Utah homes

Cast iron, clay lateral, hard water scale, roots. The local failure modes.

Worth doing

When a drain has backed up before. When several fixtures are affected at once. When the house predates about 1970. When you are buying and want to know what you are inheriting. When someone has quoted you an excavation and you would like to see the reason.

Not worth doing

A bathroom sink that is slow for the first time is almost always hair in the trap. Paying for a camera to confirm that is money spent on something already known. We will say so on the phone.

What a camera cannot tell you

It shows the inside of the pipe well. It does not show the condition of the soil around it, and it cannot always distinguish a shallow belly from a camera resting at an angle. Where the picture is ambiguous, the honest answer is that it is ambiguous.

Getting value from it

Watch the screen while it happens, and ask for the recording. It is your pipe. If a recommendation follows, it should be tied to something you saw.

What it costs against what it prevents

A camera pass is a small fraction of an excavation. Its value is not that it finds problems; it is that it stops you paying for the wrong solution to one you already know about.

The question it exists to answer

Is this pipe sound. Everything else follows from that. A sound pipe with a coated wall needs cleaning. A pipe that has failed structurally needs something else, and nothing about the symptoms inside the house distinguishes the two.

What a good camera pass includes

Distance recorded as the head travels, so a fault has a location rather than just a description. Footage you can keep. And a plain statement of the pipe’s condition along the whole run, not only at the point of interest.

A note on being sold one

A camera is a genuinely useful tool and it is also an easy add-on to sell. The test is whether anyone can explain what question it will answer for your specific situation. If the answer is vague, the inspection probably is not needed.

A drain technician feeding a cable into an open sewer cleanout in the front lawn of an older Ogden home.

Look first. Then clear it.

Most drain calls run the same four steps. The order matters: everything we recommend comes after we have seen the line, not before.

  1. 01

    Ask

    What is the drain doing, which fixtures are affected, how old is the house, has it happened before. Five minutes on the phone usually narrows it to two possibilities.

    You get a straight answer about whether this needs a visit.

  2. 02

    Look

    On anything recurring, the camera goes in before the cable does. We find where the restriction is and what is causing it.

    You watch the same screen we do.

  3. 03

    Clear

    Cable, jetter or descaler, chosen for what we actually found. Grease gets cut out, not punched through.

    The line is open, and the cause is gone with it.

  4. 04

    Show

    A second camera pass after the work, so you can see the pipe you are left with, including when the answer is that nothing is wrong with it.

    You know the condition of your line, not just that the water moved.

What the camera actually shows

You watch the same screen we do. These are the three things we find most often behind a drain that will not stay clear.

Root intrusion. Roots at a clay joint. Common under mature trees on Ogden's older streets.
Root intrusion Roots at a clay joint. Common under mature trees on Ogden's older streets.
Mineral scale. Cast iron closed down by hard water scale. Regularly mistaken for a clog.
Mineral scale Cast iron closed down by hard water scale. Regularly mistaken for a clog.
A belly in the line. A low section holding water. It will keep catching waste until it is corrected.
A belly in the line A low section holding water. It will keep catching waste until it is corrected.

Questions we get asked

Who is this written for?

Homeowners in Ogden and the surrounding Northern Utah towns who want to understand a recommendation before agreeing to it.

Does this apply to my property?

Generally, though the specifics depend on the age of the house and what its lines are made of. We would want to see it before saying anything for certain.

Not sure if this is what you have?

Tell us what the drain is doing. We will tell you what usually causes that pattern before you commit to anything.

What is the drain doing?

What is the drain doing?

Worth saying up front. If the pipe turns out to be healthy, we will tell you that. We do not turn a drain cleaning call into a sewer replacement pitch.

Backing up right now? (801) 643-5784

What we do when the pipe is fine

No fault found

Sometimes the camera goes down a line that has backed up three times and finds nothing wrong with the pipe. Grease, or roots at one joint, or a fixture that was never vented properly. The pipe itself is sound.

When that happens we clean it properly, tell you what caused it, and leave. That is the whole visit. A recurring clog is not evidence that a sewer needs replacing, and we are not going to say it is.

Related

Tell us what the drain is doing

Describe the symptom and we will tell you what usually causes it. If it needs a look, we will come and look.

No call-out pressure and no sewer replacement pitch. If cleaning is the fix, cleaning is what we quote.

Call and talk it through (801) 643-5784 Describe the symptom Takes under a minute Send it in writing office@draincleaningogden.com
HoursMonday to Saturday, 7am to 7pm
Based inOgden, Utah
License #14290593-5501
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