We survey across B70 and B71 – West Bromwich, Carters Green, Greets Green, Hill Top, Charlemont, Friar Park, Stone Cross, Hateley Heath and Yew Tree, plus the trading estates around them.

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.

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What you get

On the estates, where one run serves several houses, the site plan is frequently the most valuable page in the report. 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

Commercial and industrial drainage. Yard drainage, interceptors and surface water systems are often altered over the years without anyone recording it.

Diverting a sewer. Where a public sewer crosses the plot and the build cannot avoid it, a diversion under section 185 of the Water Industry Act is the route – and Severn Trent will not consider one without a survey and a plan showing what is there now.

All the reasons a CCTV survey gets commissioned

Why drains fail in West Bromwich

A drain fails because of what is around it, not just what goes down it. Three things account for most of what we log locally.

Made ground, and what it does to a drain. West Bromwich’s foundries, brickworks and marl holes left large areas of infilled land that continue to settle. Drainage laid across it moves with it. On camera that shows as displaced joints, dips that hold water, and runs whose fall is not what the original drawings would have said.

Shallow coal workings underneath. The Thick Coal was worked across the borough at shallow depth, adding a second source of ground movement to the first. What that causes: uneven settlement, and pipe joints that step apart where the ground has dropped unevenly beneath them.

Post-war estates, all of an age. Charlemont, Friar Park, Stone Cross and Yew Tree were built through the pitch fibre era. Establishing whether a property is on pitch fibre or clay changes what any future problem will cost, which is exactly the sort of thing a pre-purchase survey is for.

Commercial and industrial drainage. The trading estates bring a different job again – larger bore, interceptors, yard drainage and surface water systems that have often been altered several times without anyone recording it. A survey and a plan is frequently the only accurate record that exists.

None of that is visible from the surface, which is why a camera settles in an hour what guesswork will not settle at all.

Who owns the drain

Since the 2011 private sewer transfer, Severn Trent owns shared drainage and everything beyond your boundary. Given how much West Bromwich drainage is shared between properties, a survey that establishes where your responsibility ends is often worth more than the survey itself.

Drainage for business premises

West Bromwich covers a fair spread of housing, from Black Lake, Carters Green, Charlemont, and this applies to most of it.

Drain rods laid out on wet paving beside a lifted cast-iron manhole cover, with a jetting hose coiled alongside

The commercial version of a blocked drain is rarely just a blocked drain – it is a closed kitchen or a yard that cannot be used.

Grease, silt and volume are the three differences from domestic work, and all three respond better to a scheduled jetting and survey than to being left until they stop the site. We work on West Bromwich commercial premises on both bases.

What it costs

West Bromwich covers a fair spread of housing, from Black Lake, Carters Green, Charlemont, and this applies to most of it.

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.

Same drain, same spot, every few months

West Bromwich covers a fair spread of housing, from Black Lake, Carters Green, Charlemont, and this applies to most of it.

That pattern is worth taking seriously, because it rarely resolves itself.

The three usual causes are a joint that has moved and now catches everything passing, a section that has settled and no longer falls towards the sewer, or roots holding a joint open. All three are visible on camera and none of them are fixed by clearing.

Worth checking before you pay for anything: repeat blockages near a boundary are very often on the lateral drain, which since 2011 has belonged to Severn Trent rather than you.

Clay, pitch fibre or plastic in West Bromwich

Around Black Lake, Carters Green, Charlemont the housing is old enough for this to matter, and B70 and B71 is where we see it most.

A camera settles what you have in about a minute, and the answer changes what any future work costs.

Clay is the default assumption on older West Bromwich property. It is rigid and brittle: it does not rot, but it moves at its joints, and that is where roots get in.

Pitch fibre is the one that catches buyers out. Coal tar impregnated wood fibre, light and quick to lay, and it loses its round shape under load. There is no single joint to point at – the deformation runs for metres.

Plastic turns up on later runs and extensions. It is often spliced into an older clay system partway along, and our reports carry a specific code for exactly that change of material.

Tree roots and West Bromwich drainage

On West Bromwich property, and particularly around Black Lake, Carters Green, Charlemont, this is the usual picture.

Roots do not break into a sound pipe. The guide printed in the back of our own survey reports puts it plainly: roots normally infiltrate via bad joints, cracks, fractures and breaks. The defect comes first and the root exploits it.

What a root is looking for is water, and a drain leaking at a joint into dry summer soil is an obvious source. A hair root finds the gap, and once inside – in a constant supply of exactly what it wants – it thickens. The root that got in through a two millimetre gap becomes a twenty millimetre root and levers the joint further apart.

Inside the pipe it behaves like a net. Water passes through it. Paper, fat and solids do not. From the house everything seems fine until the day it is not.

Common questions

Can you survey commercial and industrial drainage? Yes — the trading estates are a good part of what we do here, including interceptors and yard drainage.