Sewer Camera Inspection

A Kaysville homeowner called about a shower that had been draining slower every year in a house past twenty years old. She had already tried a bottled drain cleaner. A plumber had already cabled the line, flooded the bathroom doing it, broken the toilet getting to it, and found roots. He did not carry a camera, so roots is where the diagnosis stopped. Roots tell you something is getting in. They do not tell you where, or how far out, or whether the pipe still has any grade left. That is the question a camera answers, and it is the reason we bring one.

Buying a home is the big one. Court is blunt about this: a camera down the sewer costs a few hundred dollars, and a sewer liner can cost twenty thousand. He has watched a buyer discover that after closing, with no money to fix it. Nobody sells you the inspection during a bidding war, so you have to ask for it. The other times it pays: a clog that keeps coming back in the same place, because a recurring clog is usually a pipe problem rather than a clog problem. Multiple fixtures draining slow on the same day, which points at the main line and not at one drain. Water coming up through a tub or floor drain when you run something else. Gurgling from a drain in another room. Before any excavation or sewer repair, so the dig happens in the right spot. And on any home past about fifty years old, once every five years is a reasonable habit.

Older Wasatch Front neighborhoods run clay and cast iron laterals. Clay comes in short sections with joints at every one of them, and tree roots find those joints. Cast iron gets rough inside and catches paper and grease until it does not move anymore. Then there is Orangeburg, a wartime pipe made from tar paper because metal was rationed, installed in millions of homes. Snake an Orangeburg line and you can tear it apart. That is exactly why we look before we cut anything into the pipe. We also find bellies, which are low spots where the line has settled and holds standing water, offset joints where two sections have shifted apart, grease buildup, and the occasional item nobody will admit to flushing. The camera tells us which of those you have, and roughly where along the run it sits.

A camera inspection shows you the inside of a pipe you can get a camera into. That is a real and specific thing, and it is what we do. It is not the same as tracing an unknown leak through a slab or a yard with specialized equipment, and we are not going to imply otherwise. We do not do underground or slab leak location. If your problem turns out to be that, we will say so and point you to someone who does that work, rather than billing you to guess. One more honest note: a line that is completely packed cannot be seen through. If the pipe is full, we clear it with a drain cleaning or a hydrojet first, then run the camera. Anyone who promises a clean picture through a blocked line has not run many of these. And a Utah correction worth knowing: you will read online that a green, soggy patch in the yard means a sewer leak. Our lines are buried around eight feet down, below the frost line, so that sign does not translate here the way it does in warm climates. Trust the drains in your house, not the lawn.

We arrive inside a 3-hour appointment window. The plumber finds the cleanout, feeds the camera down the line, and you watch the screen with him as he tells you what he is looking at. If the line is clean, you hear that and you are done. If there is a problem, you get what it is, roughly where it is, and a real number before anything else happens. Plenty of our camera jobs end with a plumber telling somebody they do not need the repair the last company quoted them.