Drain inspection in Dubai

Why the survey comes before the quote

A blocked drain is a symptom. Grease, scale, sand, a foreign object, a moved joint, a collapsed section and a length of pipe laid at the wrong fall all present the same way at the fixture: slow water. From the outside they are indistinguishable. Inside the pipe they look nothing like each other, and each carries a different repair and a different bill.

Every drainage decision worth making depends on knowing which one you have. Jet a cracked pipe and you buy an excavation. Reline a pipe that only needed jetting and you spend ten times what the job required. Cable a line whose fall is wrong and you will cable it again next quarter, forever.

A survey ends the guessing, and it is the least expensive component of any drainage job. It is also the only deliverable you keep. Footage and a report belong to you and can be handed to any contractor, which is precisely why a contractor who resists surveying should be treated with interest.

When to survey a drain

• A blockage has recurred in the same location. Two clearances is a coincidence. Three is a defect.
• Before buying a villa or a commercial unit. Drainage is below ground, outside the scope of most building inspections, and among the most expensive things to put right after handover.
• Before any repair, relining or excavation is quoted. Nobody can price a repair to a defect they have not measured.
• At handover of a new building, before the contractor's liability period closes. Construction debris and mortar in a drainage run is common and is very much easier to argue about while the contractor is still on site.
• After a sewage backup, to establish whether the cause was the building's line or the network beyond it.
• As the first step in any maintenance contract, so the schedule is set by evidence rather than by a template.

What the survey finds

Drainage defects fall into two families, and the distinction is the whole point of looking.

Service defects

Things in the pipe that should not be there. Grease coating, mineral scale, sand and silt, a foreign object, root mass. These are cleaning problems. They are solved by drain cleaning or hydro jetting and the pipe is then as good as it was.

Structural defects

Things wrong with the pipe itself. A crack, a fracture, a displaced or open joint, deformation, a partial or total collapse, back-fall where a section runs uphill, or an intruding connection from a later alteration. None of these are solved by cleaning. They are solved by drain repair, relining or replacement, and cleaning a line with a structural defect will usually make it worse.

Surveys are commonly reported against an international pipe condition coding system, the best known being the Manual of Sewer Condition Classification published in the United Kingdom, which gives each observation a standard code and a location. Coding matters because it lets a second contractor read the first contractor's report and reach the same conclusion.

Our drain inspection process

1. Access

   We identify and open the nearest suitable access: an inspection chamber, a rodding eye, a gully or the fixture itself. Where no access exists, one is agreed with you before anything is cut.

2. Pre-clean if required

   A line silted to the crown cannot be surveyed. Where necessary we clear enough to pass the camera, and record the condition before and after so nothing is hidden by the clearance.

3. Survey

   The camera is passed the full length of the run. Every observation is recorded with its distance from the access point, so a defect at 8.4 metres can be found again by someone who was not there.

4. Location and depth

   Where a defect will need excavation, a sonde in the camera head is traced from the surface and the position and depth are marked, so digging happens once and in the right place.

5. Report

   You receive the footage, a list of observations with their locations, the pipe material and diameter where determinable, and a plain statement of which observations are service defects and which are structural.

6. Recommendation

   What we would do, in what order, and what can safely wait. If nothing needs doing, the report says so.

What drives the cost of a drain survey

• The length of the run and the number of separate lines to be surveyed.
• Whether an access point exists. Surveying from an existing chamber is straightforward. Creating access is a different job.
• Whether the line must be cleared before the camera can pass, and how much clearance that takes.
• Whether location and depth tracing is required, which is usually the case only when excavation is likely.
• Pipe diameter, which determines the camera and crawler used. A 50 mm waste and a 300 mm sewer are not surveyed with the same equipment.
• Reporting depth. A short condition summary and a fully coded survey suitable for an insurance claim or a purchase negotiation are different pieces of work.

See drain inspection cost in Dubai for how these interact, and what a drain survey report contains for what you should expect to receive.

Surveying compared with the alternative

For the mechanics of what happens inside the pipe, see how drain camera inspections work and common drainage problems.

Frequently asked questions

Related pages

• Drain Cleaning
• Hydro Jetting
• CCTV Drain Inspection
• Drain Repair
• Sewer Pipe Relining
• Drain Survey Report