Specify the work, and the evidence, before anyone lines anything
You will never see this work. Once a liner is cured there is no way back to look at what was underneath, and everything you will ever know comes from footage somebody else shot. This builds the document that settles, in advance, what evidence gets produced and who owns it.
The asymmetry that makes this trade different
In most trades a buyer can eventually look at what they bought. A roof can be inspected, a tank can be opened, a truck can be weighed. A lined pipe cannot. The liner covers the evidence, permanently, and the only record of what was underneath is a recording made by the party being paid to line it.
That is not an accusation against anybody in the trade. It is a structure, and the competent firms are usually the ones most willing to hand over the file, because they have nothing to lose by it. The defence is simply to ask before rather than after: a buyer who requests the pre-clean footage once the liner is in has asked too late, and a buyer who wrote it into the scope has it whatever happens next.
1. Who is asking
The evidence items, and what each one prevents
1. A full camera survey before any work, recorded, with distances and depths, delivered to us as a file we keep.
This is the only record of what the pipe was. Once the liner is in, nobody can go back and look.
2. A second camera pass after cleaning and before lining, recorded and delivered the same way.
Cleaning routinely reveals defects the first pass could not see through the debris. This is the survey that decides whether lining is still the right method, and it is the one most often skipped.
3. A final camera survey after cure and reinstatement, recorded and delivered.
It shows every lateral cut back open, the liner seated, and no wrinkling or annular gap at the ends.
4. All footage, logs and reports are our property on delivery, usable with any other contractor.
Footage that stays with the contractor cannot be shown to a second opinion, which is the whole point of having it.
5. The cure record: method, temperatures or exposure, times, and who witnessed it.
A liner is only as good as its cure, and the cure is invisible afterwards. The record is the only evidence it happened as specified.
6. Liner and resin documentation: product, batch, and the manufacturer's data sheet for what was actually installed.
Substitution happens, and the only way to know what is in your pipe is to have asked for the paperwork before it went in.
7. A schedule of every lateral: located, reinstated, and shown open on the final footage.
A missed lateral is the classic CIPP failure and it is not discovered until somebody upstairs cannot drain.
8. Where the specification calls for it, a cured sample retained and tested to the referenced standard, with the report delivered to us.
It is the one physical check on the liner itself. Whether it applies depends on the specification, which is why this asks rather than assumes.
The commercial declarations
1. Your contractor licence number for this state, and confirmation it is active, plus certificates of insurance.
Verifiable in a state register in a couple of minutes, and the one check that separates a company from a website.
2. What happens if the post-cleaning survey reveals a defect that rules lining out: who decides, what is charged for work already done, and how the scope is varied.
This is the commonest way a fixed price stops being fixed. Agreed in advance it is a procedure; agreed on the day it is a negotiation you will lose, because the excavator is already on site.
3. Everything excluded from the price: access and excavation, traffic control, permits, bypass pumping, restoration, disposal, standby time.
On a municipal or commercial job these routinely rival the lining itself.
4. The warranty: what it covers, for how long, and what voids it.
A liner is sold on a service life measured in decades. A warranty measured in months is a different product, and the gap is worth seeing before signing.
5. Which parts of this work you subcontract, and to whom.
Cleaning, lining and reinstatement are frequently three firms. Knowing that is not a problem; discovering it is.
6. Two references for lines of comparable diameter, length and service, with the year.
Comparable means the same kind of pipe, not the same industry.
The one that costs the most money
Of everything on this page, the item that changes the most invoices is the rule for what happens when the post-cleaning survey reveals something that rules lining out. Agreed in advance it is a procedure with a price attached. Agreed on the day it is a negotiation conducted with the crew already on site and the excavator already mobilized, and that is not a negotiation a pipe owner wins.
What a survey has to show before any of this is on inspection and assessment, which defects rule lining out is on lining against replacement, and what moves a price is on what lining costs.