My drain was flushed two years ago and it is failing again. Does that mean it is broken?

It is one of the strongest hints available short of a camera. Flushing clears a restriction; it does not repair a pipe. A drain that silts or roots up again quickly is usually telling you the pipe itself has a problem, or that whatever is feeding it — roof water, a neighbouring slope — has not changed.

How long do perimeter drains last?

We do not publish a service-life figure, because we have not found one for Greater Victoria that is anything more than a trade rule of thumb repeated between websites. What we will say is that pipe material and what a camera shows decide it, not a number of years, and that the material in an older local house is the older material described above.

Can I look down there myself?

You can, if you have access to a cleanout, with a cheap borescope. It will show you the first few feet, which is occasionally enough to see roots and never enough to see the whole run. Treat it as a reason to book the real thing, not a substitute.

How do I tell whether my drain is blocked, collapsed, or just old?

Blocked, broken, or just old: reading a perimeter drain from the outside

Direct answer · reviewed 2026-09-22

From the outside, you cannot tell them apart with confidence — and any page that says otherwise is selling something. What you can do is work out which is plausible. A drain that works in light rain and fails in heavy rain is behaving like a restricted one. A drain that has never coped since a particular winter is behaving like a broken one. A drain in a pre-war Victoria house that has never been touched is, by age and by what was laid at the time, a candidate for both. The only instrument that distinguishes them is a camera in the pipe, and that is the cheapest step in this whole trade.

Conditions and exceptions

Age raises suspicion; it does not convict. Plenty of old clay tile still runs.
A drain can be blocked in one place and perfect everywhere else. That distinction is the difference between a spot repair and a replacement.
Nothing on this page is a diagnosis of your house. It is the set of possibilities a camera is there to sort out.

Drain problem assessment

Local evidence

Every figure below is quoted from the source shown or is our labelled estimate. Verified dates are the day we last checked the source; a figure whose check is overdue is withheld rather than shown.

What older Greater Victoria houses have in the ground: A single 4-inch pipe, sometimes 3-inch; Clay tile and concrete pipe were laid in short lengths with open joints — the same joints that let water in let roots in; RainTek Drainage & Waterproofing (Victoria) · quoted · verified 2026-09-22
Open joints on butt-jointed tile: 6 mm to 10 mm, with the top half of each joint covered with sheathing paper, 0.10 mm polyethylene or No. 15 asphalt or tar-saturated felt; Province of British Columbia (BC Codes) · quoted · verified 2026-09-22
Crushed stone over the pipe: At least 150 mm of crushed stone or other coarse clean granular material, with no more than 10% passing a 4 mm sieve; “Clean” matters: fines wash in and blind the stone, and the drain silts up; Province of British Columbia (BC Codes) · quoted · verified 2026-09-22
Camera inspection (drain scope) in Greater Victoria: From $295; The lowest published figure we can cite; a longer run or a difficult access point costs more · Ask whether you receive the video and a written report; RainTek Drainage & Waterproofing (Victoria) · quoted · verified 2026-09-22

What is actually in the ground under an older Victoria house

A single 4-inch pipe, sometimes 3-inch In the pre-war and early post-war housing that fills Fairfield, James Bay, Oak Bay and Fernwood, that pipe is usually clay tile or concrete, laid in short lengths with deliberate gaps between them.

The gaps are not a defect. The Code still specifies them: 6 mm to 10 mm, with the top half of each joint covered with sheathing paper, 0.10 mm polyethylene or No. 15 asphalt or tar-saturated felt Water is meant to enter through those joints. So are roots. A drain laid beside a foundation in nineteen-thirty has had ninety winters of fine tree roots finding the one reliable source of water on the property.

The other half of the design is the stone around the pipe: At least 150 mm of crushed stone or other coarse clean granular material, with no more than 10% passing a 4 mm sieve The word doing the work is “clean”. When fines wash into the stone — because the filter fabric was skipped, or there was never any — the stone stops being a drainage layer and starts being dirt, and the pipe below it silts up. That is a slow failure that looks exactly like a blockage.

Three patterns, and what each one usually means

None of those rows is a verdict. They are what an experienced person is thinking while they walk around your house, written down so you can think it too — and so you can tell whether the person quoting you has looked at the same things.

How the symptom behaves, and what it is consistent with
What you observe	Consistent with	What would confirm it
Copes with ordinary rain, fails in a downpour	A restriction: roots, silt, or a partially crushed section	A camera showing where the water backs up
Stopped coping after one particular winter or one piece of work	A break or a crush — a machine, a settled section, a root that finally split a joint	A camera reaching a hard stop at a repeatable distance
Never dries out, no clear event, old house	End of service life, or a drain that was never connected to anywhere useful	A camera plus finding where the line actually discharges
Wet only where a downspout lands	Surface water, not the drain at all	Watching it rain, then moving the downspout

Why the camera is the step, not the quote

A camera inspection locally starts at From $295. Against a job that can run into five figures, that is the cheapest decision you will make, and it converts every sentence above from a possibility into a fact: where the water stands, what the pipe is made of, whether it is broken, and at what distance from the house.

Ask for the recording and a written summary, not a verbal account. A contractor who has seen the inside of your drain and will not show you the video is asking you to buy their conclusion rather than the evidence.

Questions homeowners ask

My drain was flushed two years ago and it is failing again. Does that mean it is broken?: It is one of the strongest hints available short of a camera. Flushing clears a restriction; it does not repair a pipe. A drain that silts or roots up again quickly is usually telling you the pipe itself has a problem, or that whatever is feeding it — roof water, a neighbouring slope — has not changed.
How long do perimeter drains last?: We do not publish a service-life figure, because we have not found one for Greater Victoria that is anything more than a trade rule of thumb repeated between websites. What we will say is that pipe material and what a camera shows decide it, not a number of years, and that the material in an older local house is the older material described above.
Can I look down there myself?: You can, if you have access to a cleanout, with a cheap borescope. It will show you the first few feet, which is occasionally enough to see roots and never enough to see the whole run. Treat it as a reason to book the real thing, not a substitute.

Your next step

Symptoms, house age and the weather turned into the causes worth investigating, in order.

Narrow it down for your house

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Sources

British Columbia Building Code 2018, Division B, Section 9.14 — Drainage — Province of British Columbia (BC Codes), accessed 2026-09-22
Common drainage questions — RainTek Drainage & Waterproofing (Victoria), accessed 2026-09-22

Code and municipal requirements are quoted from the sources above; price ranges are what named local companies publish, and the companies that publish them sell the work. Nothing here is a diagnosis of a particular house: only a camera in your own drain can tell you what is wrong with it. Report a correction.