Root Intrusion
The commonest by far in older Paarl streets. Oak and poplar roots find a clay joint, get in as a hair and grow into a mat that catches everything.
Home / CCTV Camera Inspections
A drain that keeps blocking is telling you something. CCTV camera inspections in Paarl put a camera down the line so you can see exactly what it is, roots, a crack, a belly or a collapse, and where it sits, before anyone lifts a paving stone. You get the footage, and a repair quote based on what is actually there.
Tell us what the drain is doing and how often, and we will come back to you with an honest, upfront price for the inspection.
Five things cause almost every repeat blockage in Paarl, and they need five different repairs. The camera tells us which one you have.
The commonest by far in older Paarl streets. Oak and poplar roots find a clay joint, get in as a hair and grow into a mat that catches everything.
Old clay and fibre-cement lines that have cracked, sheared at a joint or partially collapsed, so the line will never run clean again until it is repaired.
A section that has settled and now holds water. Everything that goes down sits in it, and the drain blocks again a few weeks after every clearing.
Years of kitchen fat, and the scale that Paarl's hard water leaves behind, narrowing the bore until the line runs at a fraction of its size.
Where a drain actually runs, traced from above ground with the sonde, before you build, pave or plant over the top of it.
Footage and stills with distances marked, for an insurer, a body corporate, an estate manager or a conveyancer who needs proof rather than an opinion.
There is a particular kind of frustration that brings people to a camera. The drain gets cleared, everything runs beautifully for a month or two, and then it backs up again in exactly the same spot. Somebody comes out and clears it again. That cycle can go on for years, and every round of it costs money without ever answering the question, because rodding a line tells you that something was in the way, not what put it there.
In Paarl the answer is very often roots. The old suburbs below the mountain, Lemoenkloof, Charleston Hill, the streets running off Main Street, are drained in clay pipe laid in short lengths with joints every metre or so, and they are lined with mature oaks and poplars. A root finds a joint that has moved a hair, gets in looking for water, and grows into a mat inside the pipe. Clearing it cuts the mat back. It does not remove the tree, and it does not fix the joint, so it grows again on exactly the same schedule.
The other big one in this valley is ground movement. The clay soils near the Berg River swell and shrink through the wet Boland winter and the dry summer, and over decades that settles a section of pipe into a shallow dip. Water stands in the dip, solids settle out of it, and the line blocks a little further along every time. Neither of those is visible from a manhole, and neither is fixed by clearing. A camera inspection takes half an hour and turns years of guessing into one repair in one place. If the line simply needs clearing first, our blocked drains page covers the jetting side.
We are based in Paarl in Lemoenkloof, so CCTV drain surveys run right across the valley: Paarl and Mbekweni, Wellington, Windmeul and Klapmuts, the estates from Boschenmeer and Pearl Valley through to Val de Vie, and out to Simondium, Franschhoek and Stellenbosch.
The point of a camera is to stop paying for the same blockage twice a year.
The survey price is agreed before we come out, and the repair is quoted separately once you have seen the footage.
Same-week surveys right across Paarl and the Boland Winelands.
We know which streets are on clay and which estates share a boundary line.
The footage is yours, so you can get a second opinion on the same facts.
The questions we get asked most before a drain survey.
It is a waterproof camera on a flexible rod, pushed down the drain line so we can watch the inside of the pipe on a screen as it goes. You need one when a drain keeps blocking after being cleared, when you want to know whether a pipe is cracked or just dirty before anyone digs up a driveway, when you are buying a property and want to know what is under it, and when an insurer or estate manager wants evidence of what actually failed.
Yes. You get the recording and stills of anything we find, with the distance down the line noted so you know where it is. That matters for two reasons: it is the evidence an insurer or a body corporate will ask for, and it means that if you get a second quote for the repair, the next person is quoting on the same facts rather than on a guess.
That is exactly what it is for. The camera head carries a sonde, a small transmitter we track from above ground, so we can mark the position and the depth of the fault on the surface. On a paved courtyard or a cobbled Paarl driveway that is the difference between lifting one square metre over the actual break and lifting the whole run on a hunch.
We do. CCTV camera inspections at Pearl Valley, Val de Vie, Boschenmeer and out to Franschhoek are regular work for us. On the estates it is usually a shared or boundary line where the question is whose side of the connection the problem sits on, and the footage settles that quickly. On the older Franschhoek and Paarl properties it is far more often roots in a clay line.
On an older property, it is one of the cheapest pieces of due diligence there is. Drains are not covered by a standard home inspection, they are invisible, and a collapsed sewer line under a mature garden is a serious bill that lands on whoever owns the house when it finally gives up. Half an hour with a camera before transfer tells you whether you are buying that problem.
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