Imagine you have just moved into your dream home near Lord Street, only to find the toilets backing up in the first week. Most standard RICS home surveys only look at the bits of the house they can see, meaning they often skip the underground drainage entirely. We speak to so many homeowners who've ended up with a £5,000 repair bill for collapsed pipes they didn't know existed. Our homebuyer drain surveys are designed to catch those hidden defects early. If we find an issue—like a displaced joint or a section of old pitch fibre pipe that is starting to squash—you can use our professional report to negotiate the price off the house or ask the seller to fix it before you move in. It's probably the smartest couple of hundred quid you will spend during the whole move.

Gone are the days when you had to dig up the whole garden just to find a simple leak. We use 'no-dig' technology, which basically means we send a tiny, high-tech camera on a flexible cable right into the heart of your drainage system. We can navigate around bends and deep into the lateral drains to see exactly what is happening in real-time. Are tree roots from the garden invading the pipe joints? Is there a buildup of FOG (fats, oils, and grease) causing a recurring snag? We will see it all in high definition. If we do find a problem, we can even use Sonde and tracing equipment to map out the exact path and depth of the pipe from above ground, so if we ever did need to reach it, we would know exactly where to point the shovel.

If you live in some of the leafier parts of Southport or Ainsdale, you are probably familiar with how persistent tree roots can be. They love the moisture inside your drains and can force their way through the tiniest gaps in the pipe joints, eventually causing a total blockage or a structural collapse. During our CCTV drain surveys, we often find these 'root nests' early on. By catching them now, we can usually clear them out with high-pressure jetting and then use our no-dig drain lining to seal the pipe from the inside. It’s a permanent fix that stops the roots coming back, and it saves you the hassle and mess of traditional excavation. Why wait for the garden to flood when we can sort it out from the inside?