Root Intrusion
Roots that have found a joint and are growing inside the pipe, with the footage showing how far the run is choked.
Home / CCTV Drain Inspection
CCTV drain inspection in Durbanville puts a camera down the sewer line and shows you what is actually wrong, on screen, with its depth and position recorded. That matters most when a drain keeps blocking in the same spot, because the footage also shows whose side of the connection point the defect sits on.
Tell us what the drain has been doing and we will call you back with an honest, upfront price before any work starts.
A blockage is a symptom. The survey is about the thing underneath it that put the blockage there, and where along the run it sits.
Roots that have found a joint and are growing inside the pipe, with the footage showing how far the run is choked.
A joint that has sunk or opened lets waste snag and ground wash in, which is why the same spot keeps catching.
Old clay and earthenware lines crack and fall in. A collapse will not clear, however many times it is rodded.
A line narrowing with grease or scale rather than blocked outright, which explains a drain that is slow long before it stops.
The camera head is tracked from the surface, so a defect is marked on the ground with a depth and a distance along the line.
Where the defect sits relative to your connection point, which is the question that decides who carries the cost.
Before the question of how to fix a recurring blockage comes a question most people never think to ask: whose pipe is it. The City of Cape Town's Wastewater and Industrial Effluent By-law draws a hard line between two things. A private sewer installation is the system on your premises that carries sewage to a connecting point on those premises. A municipal sewer is any pipe under the Council's control. Everything about who pays follows from which side of that connecting point a defect sits on.
On your side, the by-law is direct. Section 5 requires the City to serve a written notice giving you a stipulated timeframe to clear the blockage or to maintain or replace the private sewer. If that timeframe passes and the line is still blocked, the City may arrange the clearing itself and recover the cost from you. There is no ambiguity there and no discretion to appeal to.
Then comes the provision worth knowing about. Section 5(4) says that where it is established that a private sewer became blocked as a result of a defect or a blockage in the municipal sewer, no costs will be recovered from any owner. Read that clause slowly, because the operative words are where it is established. The by-law does not say who establishes it, and it does not say how. What it means in practice is that the homeowner who can show where the defect actually sits is in a different position from the homeowner who can only assert it.
There is a third case that comes up constantly in Durbanville, because of how much of the area is townhouse complexes, security estates and cluster developments. Where a single run serves two or more properties, the by-law calls it a combined private sewer, and it allows the City to arrange maintenance or replacement and then fix the cost proportionally across every owner served by that line. If you are on a shared run, a survey establishes whether the defect is on the common line or on your own spur, and those are very different bills.
Before you agree to any excavation: get the line on camera, get the depth and the distance along the run written down, and keep the footage. If the defect turns out to be past your connecting point, that recording is the thing that establishes it. If it is on your side, you have still converted an open-ended trench into a dig in one marked place. For a line that is blocked right now rather than blocking repeatedly, blocked drain clearing in Durbanville is the job you actually want first.
A survey is only worth what you can still prove a month later, so the output is a recording and a marked position, not a verbal summary at the gate.
The things that come up again and again in local reviews, and the things we care most about getting right.
You get the price before we start, so there is no surprise call-out fee on the invoice.
Quick call-outs across Durbanville and the northern suburbs during business hours.
Based in Durbanville and quick to reach right across the northern suburbs.
We treat your home with care and clean up before we leave.
It depends on how much line has to be surveyed and how the drain can be accessed, so we give you the figure before we start rather than after. What we will say is that an inspection is priced as its own piece of work, not bundled invisibly into a repair, because the whole point of it is to decide whether a repair is needed at all. If the survey shows the line is sound, you have paid for an answer and there is nothing further to do.
It is worth it when a drain has blocked more than once in the same place, when a blockage returns within weeks of being cleared, when there is subsidence or a wet patch over the line, and before you buy an older property with mature trees near the sewer run. It is usually not worth it for a single blocked toilet or a kitchen sink full of fat, which is an ordinary clearing job. If you describe what has happened, we will tell you honestly which of the two you have.
Yes. The recording is the deliverable, along with the depth and position of anything found. You need it in your own hands because it is the thing you show to an insurer, to a conveyancer, to a body corporate or to the City. A verbal description of what somebody saw on a screen is worth very little once money is being argued about.
Yes. The camera head is tracked from the surface, so a defect can be marked on the ground with a depth and a distance along the run. That is the difference between digging in one place and digging a trench to search. It is also what turns the survey into something an excavation can be quoted against properly.
It provides the evidence, and the City makes the determination. The Wastewater and Industrial Effluent By-law says that where it is established that a private sewer became blocked as a result of a defect or blockage in the municipal sewer, no costs are recovered from the owner. The words that carry the weight are where it is established. Footage showing the defect's position relative to your connection point is how that gets established rather than argued.
Normally no. The camera goes in through an existing access point: a manhole, an inspection eye, a gully or a removed pan. Finding a way in without breaking anything is part of the job, and on the rare property where there is genuinely no access we will tell you what creating one would involve before you agree to it.
Yes, and on an older Durbanville property with large trees near the sewer line it is a sensible thing to spend money on before transfer rather than after. A drain defect is invisible at a show day and expensive once it is yours. The survey gives you either peace of mind or a documented, costed problem to raise while the price is still being discussed.
They are two separate things and they are priced separately. A line often has to be cleared before a camera can see anything at all, so where a drain is currently blocked the usual order is to jet it first and survey afterwards. If you only want the drain flowing again and there is no history of it recurring, ordinary drain clearing is the cheaper answer and we will say so.
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