One slow drain is a clog. Every slow drain is a main line.

The first question we ask on a drain call is which drains are slow. One fixture backing up is a local problem - hair and soap in a lavatory trap, grease in a kitchen arm, lint in a laundry standpipe. But if the basement floor drain gurgles when the washer empties, or the toilet bubbles when the tub drains, the blockage is downstream of everything and you have a main line problem. Those two calls look identical from the kitchen and are nothing alike underground.

Where you live shapes what we find. The mature streets in Delaware, Old Worthington and the older parts of Powell sit over clay or early cast-iron laterals with joints every few feet, and sixty years of silver maple and sweetgum roots have found every one of them. The 1990s and 2000s subdivisions in Lewis Center and Liberty Township have newer PVC laterals with tight joints, so their main-line backups are almost never collapsed pipe - they are grease, wipes, and a shallow-pitch run that never quite self-scours. Knowing which of those you have changes the tool we bring, and sometimes it changes whether we should be cutting at all.

So we clear the line first, then look at it. Camera footage tells you whether you paid for a repair or a reprieve, and it is the difference between a plumber saying your line is bad and a plumber showing you the offset joint at 42 feet. We will also tell you when a camera is not worth it - if your kitchen arm clogs every eighteen months from grease and the fix is a jetting and a habit change, spending three hundred dollars to watch it on a screen is not doing you a favor.