Guide
What a CCTV drain survey shows: footage, defect codes, the report
Updated
Two firms can put the same camera down the same pipe and hand you very different things afterwards. Knowing what a proper survey report contains is how you tell a £250 piece of evidence from a £250 sales pitch.
What the camera records
The engineer runs a crawler or push-rod camera through each drain, usually after jetting if the pipe is too dirty to read, recording continuous footage with an on-screen distance counter. Everything of note is logged against that distance from a fixed access point, which is what lets a repair firm later excavate one precise spot rather than exploring your garden. Where pipe positions or depths are uncertain, a sonde on the camera head can be traced from the surface to produce a drain map, usually a paid extra.
The defects a survey finds, and how they're graded
- Structural defects
- Cracks, fractures, broken or deformed pipe, displaced or open joints, collapsed sections. These are the expensive ones: they determine whether the fix is a £300–£1,500 patch line or a £600–£2,500+ excavation.
- Service defects
- Root ingress, scale, grease, silt deposits, standing water indicating a sag (a "belly") in the pipe. Often clearable by cutting or jetting, but the report should say whether they will simply return.
- Observations
- Pipe material and diameter changes, connections, access points, flow direction. Dull until you need a build-over agreement or a repair quote, at which point they are the map.
Professional reports code observations to the industry's standard defect classification scheme (the WRc coding used across UK drainage), with severity gradings that separate cosmetic wear from defects needing action. You don't need to read the codes yourself; their presence tells you the survey follows the standard and can be relied on, and priced against, by any other firm.
What you should receive for your money
- The recorded footage, yours to keep and share, not a viewing over the engineer's shoulder.
- A written report listing each run surveyed, defects with codes, distances and severity, and photographs of key findings.
- A recommendations section priced separately from the survey fee, so the diagnosis is independent of the cure.
- A site plan or drain map where mapping was commissioned.
A firm that surveys your drains and quotes its own repairs has an obvious interest in what the report emphasises. That doesn't make the report wrong, but it is one good reason to insist on footage and coded findings: they let you send the evidence to a second firm for a competing repair price. Survey costs are typical 2026 quotes, £150–£350 standard, £200–£400 homebuyer; get yours quoted.