How a flexible camcorder helped eliminate clogging

It so happened that in the apartment, where a very expensive repair at the current prices had just ended, there were constantly blockages in the sewage system. Cable had to be cleaned every other day. The cable was cleared through a drain under the kitchen sink. But by the end of the sewage flowed ...


Open door under the sink

What it looks like

Drain pipe
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Pipes, a comb, gates, filters and the counter in the right part are all from system of water supply. We are interested in stock - a gray tee on the left, the exit of which goes into the wall perpendicular to the wall in the direction away from us. If it is dismantled (a couple of minutes), then a semi-rigid cable can be thrust into the opened hole, with which the plumbers in such cases clean the congestion. For a couple of days it helped, and then the water again stopped leaving. Both from a kitchen sink, and from a toilet bowl, a shower cabin and a wash basin in a bathroom.

It became clear that at the junction of the horizontal sewer pipe coming from our apartment, with a vertical common sewer drain of the entire entrance turned out to be a foreign body. It was possible to get to the problem area with the purpose of disassembling, finding the cause of blockage and eliminating this cause only if you dismantle all the expensive plumbing, half of the built-in kitchen with a worktop, break the tile in several areas, and then restore it all. The cost of such a decision - a lot of money and the day of the week of work.

Decision

Another solution turned out to be the use of a flexible video camera, with the help of which it was possible to find and remove a foreign body that caused the blockages. I used a flexible camcorder .

The camera comes in a convenient case, attachments are attached to it (a mirror to look “sideways” or “backward”, a hook and a magnet).


Appearance


Nozzles

Source of blockage

We now return to the original problem - to find and eliminate the cause of blockage of sewage. A video camera was inserted through a hole about 50 mm in diameter (marked with a red arrow in photo No. 3). The camera has its own backlight and produces a high-quality image on the laptop screen. It took about half an hour to learn how to control the camera, to understand where the top is and where the bottom is in the picture. But the efforts were fully justified when the old gasket, which was the cause of blockages, was removed from the pipe.


The removed object lies on a paper towel 225x225 mm

Connecting a flexible video camera with a computer

I tested it with several stationary desktops and with three laptops. At all - Windows 10. Before connecting the camera, you must install the drivers that come with it. There were problems with two ACER laptops (probably, some incompatibility with USB 3.0 ports from this manufacturer). On a laptop from Samsung and on the desktops there were no problems. And with laptops from ACER, we also managed to set up the camera, if you connect it not directly to the standard USB 3.0 port, but through a simple USB hub (USB splitter).


Connection

With such a connection, the exchange rate corresponds to the USB 2.0 standard, but this is quite enough.

findings

In addition to this camera, I had to use cheap "endoscopes", issuing an image on a smartphone. The price of these devices is several times lower, but the image quality due to the small diameter of the camera is also several times worse and it is almost impossible to control the camera. Highly recommend flexible camcorder . She already saved me about a hundred times more money than the amount I gave for her.


Author: Peregudov Mikhail Alexandrovich, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Moscow