This is one of my rental properties where the previous owner had done very questionable plumbing/electrical and I have been correcting as I find them.

To make a long story short, I have been wondering if there is a drain line leak under the house. The reason is last month I was doing some wiring using an existing underground PVC electrical conduit that goes under the slab, and as I pulled the conductors out of the conduit I noticed the conductors are very wet. No doubt the conduit is full of water, but why?

The conduit enters into the slab and comes up at another point 18' away. Both ends are at least 20' from the exterior edge of the house. There is no reason to have a conduit full of water unless it is below the water table (it is not) or there is a leak nearby. The nearest suspect is a 2" kitchen drain line. I know the kitchen sink used to be along a wall, but was later moved to an island and the drain redone. Here is the general layout.



There is a 2" CI line from 1955 that runs from west (upstream) to east (downstream). The kitchen line which is newer in PVC ties in so there is a PVC wye there. My plan was to find a way to scope the line. I have a CO on the upstream end of the wye so that's the location to insert my camera.

I bought this $20 camera from Amazon. One that you can control from your phone, it's about 15ft long with a USB port to plug into your phone, the other end of the cable is a waterproof camera the size of a #2 pencil. It has a set of LED light. You plug that into your phone and it takes over your phone's camera.


The resolution is not bad, the big problem is the cable is very "soft" kind of like a phone wire. You can't really push that cable into the drain. If it's a straight line it will work, but navigating through elbows is a challenge. What I did to get around this problem, is I have a fiberglass fish tape for pulling wire through conduits. I taped the fish table to the camera cable, the fish tape added some stiffness to the cable and I was able to get to the junction where the kitchen drain ties into the main line.

Here are some pictures I took with the phone camera with the endoscope in the line with the camera positioned just upstream of the kitchen PVC wye,



A closer view to show where the kitchen ties in. You can see there is a branch off to the left that leads to the kitchen drain.



Even closer.



If I pull the camera back, I see where it transitions from cast iron to PVC.



Another view...if you look at the upper left corner you can see a sliver of black space?



My questions are:

(1) If you look at the cast iron portion, the circle doesn't quite match that of the PVC. In fact it looks like the CI pipe is higher than the PVC pipe. Does it mean that wye fitting was badly plumbed?

Here are two short videos just a few minutes each. I added some annotations along the video to help ask my questions.

The first one with the camera positioned just upstream of the PVC wye fitting. The pipe is empty and I turned the kitchen faucet on, you can see the water rises until the camera is totally under water. Then I turned the faucet off and water drains out. The question I have here is - if you look at the video, is it normal for the pipe to fill like this? I was expecting to see the water from the kitchen branch rush into the fitting, but no, the entire pipe and fitting seems to fill and drain. At the end the camera is pulled back you can see the CI pipe seems to be higher. I wonder if the PVC fitting was installed crocked.

[vid173.photobucket.com]

The next video the camera starts just downstream of the same fitting but I slowly pull it back and you can see the fitting as the camera moved through it. Again the end shows where the CI pipe upstream didn't look quite right to me. Your thoughts?

[vid173.photobucket.com]

Could there be a leak from that fitting?



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I wonder if that's a hub on the CI and the pvc wasn't centered in it. Just laid on the bottom of the hub and sealed top and sides? Not uncommon for in ground conduit to have water. Maybe the joints weren't glued?

can you get the camera into the electrical pipe for a look?

No idea. Those pictures and videos are the best I have but the upstream joint between CI and PVC looks strange to me, while the other end the downstream joint looks ok. The 60 year old CI pipe had so much buildup I can't tell if its pipe or hub.

I think I will put the cam down from the kitchen drain and see where it leads if I can get it to navigate to the fitting I can get a view of the joint from the branch.

I guess the bottom line is, if its your home and you see this is it enough cause to investigate or would you let that go until there is a problem?

Packy I did it has water in it very mucky cant make out anything I have already rewired it through the attic and abandoned that conduit.

BUMP!