Should you get a sewer scope before buying a house in Taylors or Fountain Inn?

By Golden Strip Sewer & Drain • Simpsonville, SC • July 2025 • 6 min read

The couple buying a house on Pelham Road in Taylors was two weeks from closing. Their agent had scheduled a home inspection. The inspector had gone through the house — foundation, roof, HVAC, electrical, plumbing fixtures — and found nothing significant. The seller had disclosed nothing. The deal was moving forward.

Then they called us.

Not because anything was wrong. Not because they were worried. Their real estate agent had mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that some buyers get a sewer scope before closing. They called because they’d heard about it and figured it couldn’t hurt.

The 1977 Pelham Road home had root intrusion at two joints and a partial offset the seller genuinely didn’t know was there. The lateral had never been scoped. The seller had owned the house for 14 years and never had a backup.

The buyers negotiated $6,500 off the purchase price before closing. The scope cost them $225.

Why the home inspection doesn’t cover this

Home inspectors are generalists. They assess what they can see and safely access. A sewer lateral runs underground from the foundation of the house to the city main under the street — it’s invisible, inaccessible, and explicitly excluded from standard home inspection scope.

When a home inspector says “plumbing functional,” they mean the fixtures drain during their test. A toilet flushes. The kitchen sink drains. They are not telling you the condition of the 60 feet of pipe underground between your house and the street. They can’t. They didn’t look at it.

“No known issues” in a seller’s disclosure means the seller isn’t aware of any problems they’re required to disclose. A seller who has never had a backup and never scoped their line has no known issues — that’s legally accurate and completely consistent with a lateral in serious need of repair.

What Taylors and Fountain Inn laterals look like right now

Both Taylors (29687) and Fountain Inn (29644) have specific pipe age profiles that make pre-purchase scoping particularly important:

In both markets, we find meaningful issues — root intrusion, offset joints, or belly sections — in a significant majority of pre-purchase scopes on homes built before 1995. Not every inspection leads to a renegotiation, but enough do that the scope pays for itself statistically even if you have to do it on three houses before finding one to buy.

The two outcomes — both good

A pre-purchase scope has two possible outcomes. Both serve the buyer.

Outcome 1: The camera finds issues. You have documented evidence of a needed repair before you own the house. You can ask the seller to make the repair before closing, negotiate a price reduction equal to the repair cost, or walk away from the deal. You did not just inherit someone else’s $8,000 sewer problem.

Outcome 2: The camera finds nothing significant. You have documented baseline footage of the lateral in good condition. You proceed to closing with confidence rather than with a question mark underground. The footage goes in your house file for the next inspection in 10 years.

Timing and logistics

The inspection window between accepted offer and closing is usually 14 to 30 days. We can schedule a scope within 24 hours of your call and turn around the written report the same day. The report is formatted for real estate use — you can share it directly with your agent and the seller’s agent.

We serve Taylors, Fountain Inn, Simpsonville, Mauldin, and Greer. No trip charge. The scope costs $150 to $300 depending on access and lateral length. If you’re under contract on a home built before 2000 in either of these ZIPs and you haven’t scoped the lateral, call us before the inspection contingency window closes.

Golden Strip Sewer & Drain • Pre-purchase camera scopes for Taylors 29687, Fountain Inn 29644, Simpsonville, Mauldin, and Greer. Learn about our camera inspection service.