How often should older pipes be camera-inspected?
Quick Answer
If your home was built before 1980 and the drains have never been camera-inspected, the honest answer is now, because the first inspection establishes what you actually own. After a clean first look, a re-inspection every few years, or after any warning sign appears, keeps the picture current.
The first inspection is the one that matters most
Everything about managing old pipes depends on knowing their condition, and age alone cannot tell you that. Two same-year houses on the same street can be years apart in pipe condition. The first camera run replaces statistics with footage of your actual system, and ours is free, with copies of every video provided to you.
From there, the schedule follows the findings. Pipe with meaningful corrosion deserves a shorter leash than pipe that surprised everyone by looking good. And any new symptom, recurring clogs, gurgling, smells, wet spots outside, resets the clock to now regardless of when the last look happened.
Inspections as a planning tool
The point of periodic footage is control. Homeowners who watch their system age get to choose when repair happens, budget for it, and schedule it across a few calm days. Homeowners who skip the looking make the same repair as an emergency. Same pipe, same fix, very different week.
The Homeowner Takeaway
The first inspection tells you what you own. The ones after that keep the repair decision on your calendar instead of your pipe's.
