What Is a Borescope? Plus Tips & Tricks to See In Hidden Places

What is a borescope and how can it make an RVer’s life easier? In today’s post, we’ll answer those questions. We’ll show you what a borescope is and how we’ve found one helpful for certain projects on our RV. We’ll also show you several other ways to see into hidden spaces using items you may have on hand.

RVs have lots of confined spaces that can make it difficult to see what’s required to get a project done. So, let’s take a look at a few tricks to help us see into tight spaces, as though we have RV X-ray vision.

What Is a Borescope?

A borescope is a tool for seeing in hard-to-reach places. It’s a camera with a wide field of view attached to a flexible tube, ideal for inspecting RV nooks and crannies.

While there are several different types of borescopes, they all have some sort of rigid or flexible tube with a lens or camera on one end. They mostly differ in what’s connected to the other end:

• some have their own self-contained display unit
• some have a small battery-powered module that sends the image via Bluetooth to another device (like your phone or tablet)
• others (like ours) have a USB plug you can use to connect it to your own phone/tablet (this kind tends to be the cheapest option)

A rigid borescope is best used for visual inspection of areas that don’t involve moving around curves and angles. Imagine a straight rigid stick trying to turn 90 degrees to get into the space you need to see. In situations where you need to see around angles or curves, you’ll instead want to choose a borescope with a flexible tube.

Borescopes often include LED lights so you can see your way around as you inspect the area in real time (or via video and/or image captures).

Video cameras on borescopes vary in terms of image quality. Larger diameter borescopes are often brighter and have inspection cameras that capture video at higher resolutions. There are also fiber optic borescopes on the market that vary in terms of the number of fibers they use.

But while there are different types, qualities, and features of borescopes, they’re all designed to let you to see what’s going on in places that are either difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye.

Being able to see into tight spaces in any vehicle or home can come in mighty handy. On an RV in particular, for example, there are several places/tasks a borescope could help with, including:

• Locating signs of a leak or broken plumbing
• Tracing plumbing through walls
• Finding something lost behind furniture or under a vehicle seat
• Inspecting your water heater tank for scale deposits (or proof that your water heater flushing worked)
• Looking in hard-to-reach or tight places (on top of your slide, for example) to avoid climbing on a ladder or getting up on your RV roof

How to Use a Borescope to See In Tight Spaces

When you need to see in the tightest of spaces (where none of the other options we list below will work), a borescope is the perfect solution.

For example, we inspected inside our motorhome’s water heater before and after cleaning to see how effective our vinegar treatment was. The borescope we used was very flexible so we attached it to a straightened wire coat hanger using electrical tape. This enabled us to aim the borescope inside the tank.

However, this was several years ago. Newer borescopes are made with more rigid wires that, when bent, hold their shape better and can be aimed as needed. They’re not expensive, but they can be useful for many purposes, including seeing inside all types of holding tanks.

The best way to show you how to use a borescope to see into tight spaces is to point you toward the video in our post on how to flush an RV water heater. For that project, we used our video borescope to look at the interior of our motorhome’s water heater.

We fed the borescope into the tank and the tiny camera on the end inspected the interior of the tank for us, allowing us to view the condition of the tank before and after treatment.

Other Tricks & Tips to See Into Tight Spaces

There are many different methods you can use to look into areas that are otherwise tough to see, from low-tech to high-tech. Let’s take a look at several other techniques we can use to see almost anywhere.

Inspection Mirror

A simple, low-tech device that auto mechanics often use to see around a car engine is a mirror. Mirrors with extendable handles and adjustable mirror heads can be very useful in many situations. A mirror can allow you to see what’s going on in an area where you can’t get your head to see with only your eyes.

In one of our earliest videos, we showed how our kitchen sink plumbing was leaking but we couldn’t get our eyes on what was going on back there to figure out the source of the leak. Before we started dismantling things, we wanted to know if the leak was coming from the plumbing or the drain pipe.

So, we stuck an extendable mirror down behind the sink and we used a flashlight to illuminate the area as we inspected it with the mirror. This enabled us to see that the drain pipe (which was flexing every time the slide was extended/retracted) had a cracked seal at one end.

Here’s the type of extendable mirror we used:

Smartphone

This is one of the best pieces of equipment we all have on hand for seeing around corners and into tight spaces.

Sometimes, you can simply stick your smartphone into an area that’s tough to see with your eyes because you can’t get your head back there… and snap a quick picture of what you’re trying to get a good look at.

You can also use your smartphone’s video camera to look at an area you need to study before undertaking a repair. We did this when we needed to repair a plumbing leak. Because we weren’t sure exactly how the plumbing worked back there, we needed to create a schematic so we could diagnose our problem and figure out the repair. So, we put our phone back there and took a video of the entire system and we were able to create a schematic from that video.

Here’s our YouTube video on that very repair:

PRO TIP: Remember – your smartphone has two cameras – one in the front and one in the back. So depending on the situation you need to visualize, you can use your phone’s camera in two different ways.

Also, if you can’t reach your phone in a tight space when holding it in your hand, you can use a “selfie stick” to extend your reach. Simply clip your phone into the holder on one end of the selfie stick, extend the stick as far as you need to, and use the remote feature to snap a picture or take a video.

For example, this one extends to 46″ which would give you a nice long reach into an area that might otherwise be difficult to get your camera to.

Getting a look at the top of your slideout this way (for water or debris) before retracting it is a terrific way to prevent a slideout flood.

Action Camera

You can also use a GoPro or other action camera on the end of a selfie stick to capture footage of a difficult-to-see area and have the camera send the footage or image directly to your phone.

Here we are doing just that in the basement of our motorhome:

You can do this with any type of action camera that offers decent footage, whether it’s a GoPro or a less expensive version. You can send footage to your phone or tablet, or you can use the remote control feature to take photos or videos from far away. Plus, these little action cameras will even take photos underwater!

Here’s our YouTube video on how to see almost anywhere to show you exactly how we’ve found these tips and tricks handy:

What Are Your Favorite Ways to See Into Tough Spots?

If you’ve got any other tips or tricks for seeing into tight spots, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a comment down below and share!

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