Plumber in Mountain View, Apache Junction, AZ

A sewer camera inspection is a modest cost and it is the highest-value hour you can spend on a house of uncertain age. It is the only way to know whether a recurring backup is a cleaning problem — grease, scale, roots — or a structural one like a cracked section, a separated joint or a belly holding standing water.

Those outcomes span an enormous price range. Root intrusion through an otherwise intact joint might be solved with jetting and an interval. A cracked section under a side yard is a spot repair. A cast iron lateral with no invert left over forty feet is a replacement. Nobody can tell you which one you have without looking, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tries.

We record the footage and you watch the screen with us. If the line is genuinely fine, we will tell you that too — that is a real outcome and it happens regularly.

For supply plumbing, thirty seconds under a bathroom sink tells most of the story. Dull gray flexible pipe stamped PB2110 is polybutylene, which means the house is from roughly 1978 to 1995 and a repipe conversation is warranted before it fails rather than after. Threaded steel with rust at the fittings is galvanized, which means pressure will keep declining and a repipe is the only real fix. Rigid copper or flexible red-and-blue PEX means the supply is in reasonable shape.

Check more than one location, though — in a neighborhood with this much repair history, what is under the kitchen sink frequently is not what is in the bathroom wall. Partial repipes done decades ago are common, and the transitions between materials are often where the next leak starts.

Send us a photo and we will tell you what you are looking at, at no charge. It is a two-minute answer that saves people a lot of guessing.