We survey across B62 and B63 – Halesowen, Hasbury, Hawne, Hayley Green, Cradley, Blackheath, Hurst Green, Lapal, Illey, Quinton and Romsley.

A CCTV drain survey puts a camera through your drainage and produces a record of what is actually there: every run, every junction, every defect, positioned to the centimetre and coded to the industry standard.

Call 0800 772 33 99 · Request a survey

What you get

With Halesowen’s falls, knowing where the gradient changes tells you where the trouble is going to start. Every section is graded, every defect coded to MSCC and positioned in metres, with a site plan and the full video. The report comes back the same day, by NADC-certified surveyors.

What a CCTV drain survey covers

Why people here ask for a survey

Buying the property. A standard structural survey does not go underground. This one does, and the report is written so it can go straight to a solicitor or be used to renegotiate.

A drain that keeps blocking. Repeated blockages are a symptom. The survey finds the root, the stepped joint or the broken section causing them.

All the reasons a CCTV survey gets commissioned

Why drains fail in Halesowen

Most recurring problems here trace back to ground conditions rather than to anything that was put down the drain. This is why.

The town has a geological formation named after it. The Halesowen Formation is a real unit of Carboniferous rock, and the point for drainage is what sits on top of it: variable made ground, clays and sands that behave differently over short distances. Two houses on the same street can have quite different ground conditions under their drains.

Falls are the local variable. The drop from the Clent and Romsley side into the Stour valley means steep runs discharging into flat ones. Steep sections stay clean; the flat sections silt up. On camera you can usually see exactly where the gradient changes, because that is where the deposits start.

Old clay in the core, pitch fibre on the estates. The town centre, Hawne and Cradley are short-length vitrified clay. Hasbury, Hayley Green and Lapal bring post-war pitch fibre, which deforms rather than cracks – worth identifying before you buy, because it is not repairable in place.

An affluent buying market. Hurst Green, Highfields, Illey and out towards Romsley are exactly the sort of properties where a drainage problem is expensive and where a pre-purchase survey earns its fee several times over.

All of it shows up on camera and none of it shows from a manhole cover, which is the practical reason a survey is worth more here than an opinion.

Who owns the drain

Since 2011 Severn Trent has owned shared drainage and everything past your boundary. With Halesowen’s falls, a defect is often some distance downhill of the property affected by it, so establishing whose length of pipe it sits in is a practical question rather than an academic one.

Surface water, foul, or both?

Blackheath and Cradley are a fair sample of Halesowen drainage, and what follows is what we find across B62 and B63.

CCTV view along a drain with green staining across the pipe wall

Worth knowing which system you are dealing with, because it changes who is responsible and what a blockage means.

Foul takes waste from the house. Surface water takes rain from roofs and hard standing. Combined takes both, which is what a great deal of older Halesowen drainage does.

A gully overflowing only in heavy rain points at the surface water side, or at a combined run that has lost capacity. A toilet backing up in dry weather points at the foul side. Our reports record the use of every section, because a wrong connection – foul into surface water, or the reverse – is a finding in its own right.

Getting to you

Drainage across Halesowen — Blackheath and Cradley and the streets around them — follows one pattern. B62 and B63 are what that covers.

We work out of Castlecroft in Wolverhampton, and Halesowen is close enough that the constraint on timing is the diary rather than the drive.

Ring and we will give you a straight answer on when, and a price before we set off.

What it costs

We cover B62 and B63, and this comes up often enough on Halesowen property to be worth setting out properly. Blackheath and Cradley see it as much as anywhere.

You get a price on the phone before we come out, so there are no surprises when we arrive.

We do not carry out repairs, relining or excavation. That is worth knowing when you are comparing quotes, because most firms who survey your drains also quote for fixing them

and when a survey says a section is failing, they are the ones who benefit. We are

not, which is also why we are comfortable telling you when a survey comes back clean.

If the blockage turns out to be on Severn Trent’s side of the boundary, we will say so rather than invoice you for it.

Reading a survey of your Halesowen drainage

Halesowen covers a fair spread of housing, from Blackheath, Cradley, Halesowen town centre, and this applies to most of it.

Reports confuse people because they mix two kinds of entry and only one is a problem.

Observations describe what is there – a junction, a chamber, a change of pipe material, the water level. In our surveys these outnumber defects by roughly three to one, and a tidy system with nothing wrong still generates a page of them.

Defects describe something wrong, and carry a severity. It is the severity, not the presence of a code, that matters.

Across every section we have graded, two thirds came back at the top grade. A long report is not automatically bad news.

Common questions

My drains only overflow after heavy rain — is a survey worth it? Yes, and that pattern is a strong sign of a partial blockage that copes until it cannot.