Everything people ring us to ask before they book, answered in full. If yours is not here, the phone is quicker than a form.
Private sewers and lateral drains serving more than one property transferred to the water companies — United Utilities here. A great many householders in WA1 and WA2 are still paying for work on lengths that are no longer theirs, simply because nobody established that.
We can tell you definitively what the layout is, where the defect sits and which properties the run serves. The formal determination is United Utilities' to make — but they make it from exactly this information, and it is far quicker with the evidence in hand.
Early enough that you still have room to negotiate. A survey the week before exchange is still worth having, but a survey three weeks before exchange is worth considerably more.
Particularly so. Much of WA2 was built as council stock with shared drainage, and buyers are frequently unaware the arrangement exists at all until the first blockage.
If it is fully blocked, it has to be cleared before a camera can see anything. If it is draining slowly, survey first — jetting removes the evidence of what was causing it.
No, deliberately. A firm that finds the fault and then quotes to fix it has an interest in what it finds. We would rather not have one.
Yes. MSCC5-coded, graded, with distances, depths and video is the standard format and it is what we produce.
We will say what the drain's condition is and where the defects are. Attributing cause is an engineer's determination, and they need this report to make it — we will not overstate it on their behalf.
Because they are often wrong. Drainage gets altered during building work and almost never gets recorded afterwards. The pipe is where the pipe is.
Usually, yes. The sonde locates the chamber closely enough that it turns a search into one small opening rather than lifting a whole patio.
A good one will not. Work done properly survives inspection, and plenty of contractors welcome the record.
Within a few weeks of the work, while the job is recent and any guarantee is unambiguously live.
If the run is a public sewer — and since 2011 many shared runs in WA1 and WA2 are — you need a build-over agreement from United Utilities. The first step in getting one is establishing what the run actually is and where it goes, which is this survey.
He may well be right. But a dated survey from before the work protects both of you: if a defect appears afterwards, the record shows whether it was already there. Builders who have been caught by that once tend to welcome it.
Often, yes. Wipes, fat and foreign objects look entirely different on camera from a fractured joint or root ingress. We report what is there — we do not decide who is at fault, but the footage usually makes that obvious.
Yes. We arrange access with the tenant or the agent, carry out the survey, and send you the report and the full video the same day. Plenty of our landlord work is for people who have never been to the property.