What the screen tells us
Every capture on our monitor is stamped with the date and the distance from the clean-out. The three on this page are from 2025: a cloudy pipe 23 feet 1 inch in on April 14, buildup 16 feet 8 inches in on May 10, and a lateral joint 42 feet 11 inches in on May 26. That footage count is what lets us put the excavator over the right spot instead of guessing.
A camera run can show:
- Cracked or broken pipe
- Roots coming through the joints
- Sags and bellies that hold water
- Collapsed sections
- Offset or separated joints
- Grease, scale and objects in the line
- Pipe laid at the wrong slope
Buying a house in the Metro-East
A sewer scope is a video inspection of the lateral from the house to the city tap, and a standard home inspection leaves it out: InterNACHI’s standards of practice do not require one. Ali Sweet’s real estate company sends us its sewer inspections and repairs:
My real estate company uses Dig N Drain for all of our sewer inspections and repairs.
In Belleville, the city’s lateral program pays for repairs between the property line and the main, but the owner first pays a licensed and bonded company to diagnose the problem. A camera run is how that diagnosis gets made.

