Before embarking on your home extension project, it’s essential to conduct a CCTV drain survey to identify potential issues and ensure a smooth construction process.
Perhaps you’d love to embrace open-plan living, double the size of your kitchen or exercise in a home gym. By building an extension, you can make your interior design dreams come true while enjoying extra space, more natural light and a touch of luxury. Plus, you can increase your property’s value. Indeed, extensions offer so many benefits that it’s no wonder Really Moving has seen ‘something of a house extension boom’ in recent years, especially since working from home became widespread.
There’s a lot to think about during the planning stage, from building regulations for extensions to fixtures and fittings. But as drainage specialists who often perform CCTV drain surveys for homeowners, we urge you not to overlook your underground pipework. Read on to discover why asking an experienced drainage company such as Mega-Rod in Bath for a pre-conditional CCTV drain survey (which is also called a pre-construction or pre-build drain camera survey) is absolutely vital.
‘One of the most frequent problems we see with small projects arises from the failure to check whether or not there are drains running beneath the footprint of a proposed building or extension,’ emphasises the Architects’ Journal. In other words, if construction work interferes with your drains, your extension project could be completely derailed.
So before extending, you need to find out exactly where your drainage system is. As our CCTV drain surveys guide points out, feeding a compact yet powerful camera into the pipes is the best, least disruptive way to accurately locate and map them. Using high-quality colour CCTV footage and a sonar transmitter, we can establish the position and layout of your drains, what they’re made of, their size and shape, their depth and angle, and the direction of flow. We can then create an up-to-date plan of your drainage system.
This helpful diagram will enable you to plan around your drains, as far as possible, so that they won’t be damaged or unnecessarily disturbed during construction work. It’ll also help you to make any drainage modifications required in light of your extension.
Another compelling reason why homeowners request pre-conditional CCTV drainage surveys is to check if their drains are structurally sound enough to cope with intense vibrations from construction equipment.
While guiding a camera through your drains, we can rotate, pan and zoom in as required. We can therefore spot any faults or damage, such as cracks, leaks or loose connections, and decide how best to resolve issues.
Findings and suggested next steps will be presented in an illustrated report. Ensuring your drains are in optimum condition before building work begins will give you real peace of mind.
Arranging a drain camera survey before building an extension can also keep you in your water company’s good books. It owns the lateral drain you share with your neighbours and the public sewers (which could well run beneath your back garden). The survey will show the position of that pipework in relation to yours and reveal whether or not your proposed building work would take place near or directly above a section of it.
Such findings are incredibly important because if you intend to build within 1m of a lateral drain or 3m of a public sewer, you must get your water company’s permission first – that’s the law. If the pipework is less than six inches wide, you may just need to provide written confirmation that your extension won’t have a significant impact on it. However, if the situation is more complex, you’ll need to apply to your water company for a build-over agreement; planning permission alone isn’t enough.
The water company must be satisfied that its pipework will remain accessible and won’t be compromised by construction work or the weight of your extension.
A home extension is a major investment. So it’s worth investing a little in a pre-conditional CCTV drain survey from Mega-Rod, which will provide crucial information and help you to enhance your plans.
After the groundwork is complete, we can perform a post-conditional CCTV drainage survey to check if your drains remain in excellent condition and if any alterations made to your drainage system will work properly.
‘Pre- and post-conditional drainage surveys are part of the due diligence process of any building project and should never be overlooked,’ concludes the Front Door home improvement guide.
Planning an extension? Call Mega-Rod today on 01225 422980 to book your CCTV drain survey.
