Whose problem is it?
Clogged exterior drains
The hardest part of an exterior drain problem is usually not clearing it. It is working out whose problem it is before anyone spends money.
Water arriving in your yard did not necessarily start there. It can come off a neighbor's regrading, out of a street inlet that has stopped accepting flow, or through a shared easement line that several properties feed into and nobody owns outright. Clearing your own pipe when the restriction sits fifty feet past your boundary is an expensive way to learn that, and it is a mistake we get asked to sort out reasonably often.
So the useful first move is establishing where your responsibility actually stops. We camera from your inlet to the property line and tell you plainly whether the fault is on your side of it. If it is not, you now hold documentation to take to the neighbor, the association or the city, which is worth considerably more than a receipt for work that was never going to help.
Document it while it is happening
- Photograph the standing water at its worst, against a fixed reference like a fence post or a step
- Note the date, the time and roughly how long the rain lasted
- Photograph where water enters your property, not only where it collects
- Check the discharge outlet during the storm rather than after it
- Keep anything you send a neighbor, an HOA or the city in writing
Before you spend anything
- Establish whether the fault is on your side of the property line
- Ask whether the line is shared or sits inside an easement
- Confirm the outlet still discharges before assuming the inlet is blocked
- Get it looked at before storm season rather than during it
Please do not dig looking for it
Irrigation lines, low-voltage lighting and utility runs share the same few inches of Florida sand as your drain line. Locating costs a great deal less than repairing whatever you hit while searching, and it is quicker.
Straight answers
Questions about clogged exterior drains
Is the drain in my yard mine or the city's?
It depends where it sits and what it connects to, and plenty of owners genuinely do not know. Broadly, the run inside your property line is yours and the street system is not, but easements and shared lines complicate that. Cameraing to the boundary turns it from an assumption into a fact, which is exactly what you need before approaching anybody else.
My neighbor's yard drains onto my property. What can I do?
Start with evidence. Photographs taken during the storm, showing where the water enters rather than only where it settles, are far more persuasive than a description afterward. If our camera work shows your own system is clear and working, that is a strong document to take into that conversation.
Flat rate, quoted before we start
Let's get it flowing
Call and talk to a person. You get a straight answer on what it is, what it costs, and when we can be there.