For many homeowners, plumbing troubles are the least enjoyable portion of home maintenance. They seriously degrade your residences' livability, they require expensive repairs, plus they can quickly get even worse if they're not corrected promptly. Once you learn you've got a serious problem in one of your drainage lines, it is possible to cut right to the heart of the matter simply by using a video inspection want to locate blockages and damage. Here's how the procedure works. - Reliant Plumbing
Advantages Of A video camera Inspection
Before the advance of compact video equipment suitable for use inside residential plumbing lines, locating a blockage or a broken pipe was often a time-consuming process requiring a lot of trial and error. Major breaks would sometimes make themselves known with profuse (and expensive!) leaks, but blockages may be much harder to detect. Homeowners would get obliged to dig extremely long sewer trenches, or even multiple trenches, to inspect suspect lines directly.
Having a video inspection unit, a plumber can locate line damage and blockages very precisely. This precision translates directly into a repair job that's faster, more effective, and cheaper. You will want to take advantage of a relevant video inspection service if the pipes are difficult to gain access to. Locating blockages in the drain or sewage beneath your foundation slab is an ideal example -- you don't want to have to break your slab open more than once!
Professional-Grade Equipment
Thanks to the rapid pace of technological development, homeowners have accessibility to some of the same powerful small inspection tools that professional plumbers. You must recognize the limitations of cheap equipment, though. Consumer-level plumbing inspection kits seldom offer greater than few dozen feet of exploration, along with their cameras lack most of the features that make professional gear so effective.
When you turn the inspection job up to a professional, the technician who does your inspection make use of a camera set-up capable of snaking through perhaps the longest drain lines. Most suitable rigs have a reach of more than 300 feet. Powerful lighting and self-righting capabilities dramatically help the picture quality a professional tech gets, too. Most importantly, professional cameras have a transmitter to help locate blockages (see below). Proper plumbing camera rigs are more expensive than $15,000.
The way the Inspection Process Works
After you call in a video inspection service, the inspection starts right on the affected fixture in your house. The plumbing lines supplying it are opened so your camera rig can be inserted through the trap. The inspection head will slowly be pushed down the road, going as far as your home's main sewage and its connection to the municipal sewer as appropriate. Good inspectors attempt to visualize as much of it as possible; the camera is often pushed through soft blockages to watch out for further damage.
Once pipe damage or even a blockage is spotted about the camera's display, the operator will locate it precisely while using built-in transmitter. The camera will be stopped with the proper point and the technician will use a locator wand to pick up its signal. The spot is marked with spray paint so you know precisely where to dig.
Drawbacks Of Hiring A Video Camera Inspection
While you probably already know, the primary drawback of a video inspection is your buck. Full system inspections cost $300 or even more. Even the most modestly-priced services cost about $100. You need to to be wary of businesses that advertise extremely cheap video inspection; their helps may only be available to customers who spend on hiring the company to fix any damage it finds.
One other disadvantage of a video inspection is the fact that you're responsible for the expense regardless of the results. When the technician fails to locate your plumbing problem, you're to square one. The only option would be usually the kind of exploratory digging you are hoping to avoid. Fortunately, when you hire a company that has good equipment and well-trained technicians, the percentages of failure are really low.
Video plumbing inspection is costly but it takes a lot of the uncertainty beyond fixing major plumbing issues. When you're facing a plumbing symptom in your own home, your first step should always be to assess the extent in the problem as fully as is possible on your own. If it seems very likely to stem from major damage that's going to require excavation, calling in videos inspection service is probably a good suggestion. - Reliant Plumbing