Why excavation is the expensive part
Digging up a drain is rarely costly because of the pipe. It is costly because of everything above it. A block-paved driveway, a stone patio, an established garden or a tiled floor all have to come up and go back, and the reinstatement usually dwarfs the repair itself.
Trenchless repair avoids that by working inside the existing pipe. The run stays exactly where it is and the surface above it is left alone.
What we can repair without digging
Patch repair installs a short resin liner over a single defect and cures it in place. It is the right answer for one isolated crack, displaced joint or badly made connection in an otherwise sound run.
Full lining, sometimes called cured in place pipe, draws a resin-impregnated liner through the whole length and cures it to form a new pipe inside the old one. Where root ingress has been the recurring problem, this is the repair that actually ends the cycle, because it seals the joints the roots were using.
Pipe bursting replaces a pipe entirely by pulling a bursting head through it, fracturing the old pipe outward while drawing a new one into the space. It suits runs too damaged to line where there is room in the ground for the fragments to go.
When digging is still the honest answer
Not every defect can be lined, and we would rather say so than sell a repair that will not hold. A fully collapsed section, a pipe that has deformed badly out of round, or a run with no usable access still needs excavation. Pitch fibre pipework, common in property built between the 1950s and 1970s, often falls into this category because it deforms into an oval and delaminates internally.
The survey is what tells us which situation we are in, before you commit to anything.
How a lining repair is done
- Survey the run on camera and locate the defect precisely
- Cut out root growth and clean the pipe wall so the liner can bond
- Install a resin liner sized to the pipe and cure it in place
- Reinstate any branch connections the liner has covered, using a robotic cutter guided by camera
- Camera the finished repair and hand over the footage as a record
Reinstating the branches is a required step, not an optional one. A liner that seals off a connection turns one problem into two.
What it costs
Trenchless repairs are quoted after a CCTV survey, because the length of the run and the condition of the pipe set both the method and the price. We do not quote below-ground repair blind: that is how variations appear halfway through a job.
Most single-section repairs are completed within a day, including the survey beforehand and the check afterwards. You get before and after footage with a written summary, which is what insurers and managing agents normally ask for.