Look before you dig
Camera Inspection and Location
A RIDGID camera down the line tells us the condition and the exact location of a problem, before anyone puts a shovel in the yard.
Chapter 01
Why you locate the line before anyone digs
A sewer lateral runs anywhere from thirty to over a hundred feet from a house to the street, and a problem can sit anywhere along that run. Dig without knowing where the break actually is and the excavator opens the whole yard on a guess, which turns a repair into a landscaping project and still might miss the spot.
Camera inspections are a modern, cost-effective way of determining the condition and exact location of a main sewer line. We run the camera before we ever bring the machine off the truck, so the hole we dig is the hole that needed digging, not the hole that seemed likely.
This matters most on an older Gainesville lot where nobody has a record of where the line was originally laid, or how deep. A camera run answers both questions in the same pass, before a single shovel of soil moves.
An open water line excavation beside a North Georgia home, marked and dug from a located line
What the RIDGID camera actually shows you, foot by foot
The camera head goes down the line on a push cable, and a sonde inside the head sends a locating signal to a receiver we walk above ground, so we can mark the exact spot and depth on the surface as the footage rolls. You are watching the same feed we are, foot by foot down the pipe, not a summary after the fact.
That footage is the record. If a section looks fine at forty feet and rough at sixty, we know precisely where sixty feet is on your property, and that is where the work happens, not somewhere close to it.
It also settles a question that comes up on almost every older home: whether the pipe material changes partway down the run. A lateral that starts as cast iron under the house and switches to clay or PVC further out behaves differently at that transition, and the camera is the only way to see it without opening the ground.
Chapter 03
Reading the line: roots, offsets, bellies, collapse
Sewer pipes often get clogged with roots, paper and sludge, which leads to slow-running drains and, eventually, complete drain blockage. On camera, root intrusion looks like hair reaching through a joint into open flow. An offset joint shows as a visible step where one pipe segment no longer lines up with the next.
A belly is a low spot where the pipe has settled and water pools instead of draining downhill, which is why the same section keeps trapping debris no matter how often it gets cleared. A true collapse is unmistakable on the feed, the pipe simply stops being round. Each of those four reads differently, and each one gets a different answer.
Cost effective because it tells you exactly where and exactly how deep
The camera itself does not fix anything, and we tell customers that up front. What it does is turn a guess into a marked spot and a known depth, which is what keeps a repair to a spot repair instead of a full-yard excavation.
It is also the fastest way to rule things out. If the line is clean and the drainage problem is closer to the house, that is worth knowing before anyone starts digging in the yard at all.
We run this same camera on a fresh install too, once the new pipe is in the ground and before the trench gets backfilled, so what gets covered over is a line we have actually watched go by, not a line we are trusting on faith.
Fortune Plumbing, Family-owned and operated since 1989. Call (770) 532-9489.
Sewer Line Inspection
Sewer pipes often get clogged with roots, paper, and sludge, which leads to slow-running drains and, eventually, complete drain blockage.
Camera inspections are a modern, cost-effective way of determining the condition and exact location of a main sewer line.