Moving the Mainline Camera

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How to propel the Sewer Rat®  camera:
There are several ways this can be accomplished, and you can probably devise many more. The preferred methods we've found:

1) Pull with a cable    2) Use the Jet Buggy and a Jetter  3) pull with a jetter  4) use a robotic crawler.

1)    Pull with a cable.  This is the most economical and easy method.  Any hand winch or other winch with a 1/8" steel cable or even 1/16" galvanized cable is sufficient to pull the lightweight camera and cable system through the sewer pipes.  We recommend also using a safety cable behind the camera for two reasons
.  One is safety, to be able to pull the camera out of an obstruction that might have been entered into unknowingly.  The second reason is to easily back up the camera to re-look at something.  The sketch shown here shows how simple this method is:Click on picture for larger view of One method to pull the camera,

 

2) Use the simple economical Jet Buggy to simply push and retrieve the camera though any pipes, using the water pressure of the jetter and the Jet Buggy nozzle to propel it, then using the hydraulic retrieval system of the jetter to bring it back. No maintenance, no training, straight forward, low cost.

3) You can always use the jetter alone, by  cleaning the pipe with the jetter, than once the jetter has reached the other manhole, attach the yoke of the camera to the jetter, and using the hydraulic system of the jetter, retrieve the jetter hose, pulling the camera with it. Once the camera has reached the retrieval manhole, un-hook the camera, bring it up out of the manhole, disconnect the video cable, then retrieve the cable without the camera.  This is simple and no cost, but it does not allow for convenient backing up, as there can be complications in moving back and forth. We still recommend a safety cable being  hooked up to the camera.

4) It also possible to obtain a robotic crawler system and modify it to hold the Sewer Rat® camera.  Some of our customers have done this, and we can let you know the manufacturers that have been used.  This works, but is expensive.

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