A sewer camera inspection is the rare home service where you watch the diagnosis happen live. But the screen is only useful if you know what you’re looking at. Here’s the tour we give every customer, written down.
The counter in the corner
The number ticking up on screen is footage — how far the camera head has traveled from the cleanout. It matters because it turns anything we see into an address. “Roots at 34 feet” plus a locator wand on the surface becomes a paint mark on your lawn and a depth reading. That precision is the difference between surgical repair and exploratory digging.
Reading the pipe wall
Materials have faces. Vitrified clay shows as segmented lengths with a visible joint every few feet — smooth ceramic, often with mineral staining. Cast iron is darker, and as it ages the interior grows rough with scale that snags debris. ABS and PVC plastic run smooth and dark or white with long solvent-welded sections and few joints. Transitions between materials mark where past repairs happened — a story of the line’s history nobody wrote down anywhere else.
The usual suspects
Root veils. Fine white threads hanging into the pipe at a joint, or a full mass blocking the view. Where there’s a veil there’s an open seam.
Standing water. The camera nose-dives into water that doesn’t drain — that’s a belly, a sag where the pipe lost its downhill grade. Water stands, solids settle, clogs recur. The footage counter tells us exactly where the belly starts and ends.
Offsets. The pipe ahead doesn’t line up with the pipe behind — one segment has shifted. Small offsets catch paper; big ones catch everything.
Fractures. Cracks running along or around the pipe wall. In clay they often radiate from a joint a root has been jacking open for years.
What a healthy line looks like
Worth saying: sometimes the camera comes back with good news. Clean walls, aligned joints, water moving briskly, no veils. If that’s your footage, the honest conclusion is “your line is fine” — and any contractor who watched that same footage and still recommended a major repair should worry you.
Either way, you should get the recording. Footage you can hand to another plumber for a second opinion keeps everyone honest — including us.