Blocked drains are the single most common call we get. Most are caused by something entirely preventable — cooking fat, wet wipes, hair, or tree roots finding a hairline crack in an old clay pipe. Clearing the blockage is the easy part; finding out why it happened is what stops it coming back.

• Sinks, basins or showers draining slowly
• Gurgling from drains or the toilet when water runs elsewhere
• A smell of sewage around floor wastes or outside gullies
• Water pooling around an outdoor drain after rain
• Toilet water rising higher than normal before it drains

A drain that is slow today is a drain that overflows next week. Acting early is almost always cheaper.

Our sewer jetter cuts through grease, sludge, silt and tree roots using water pressure alone, scouring the pipe wall back toward its original diameter. Unlike a mechanical snake, which punches a hole through the blockage and leaves the rest behind, jetting clears the full bore of the pipe — so the problem stays gone.

For drains that block repeatedly, we run a CCTV camera through the line and show you the footage. That tells us whether we are dealing with root intrusion, a collapsed or misaligned section, a belly holding water, or simply a build-up from what has been going down the sink.

It also means any repair quote is based on what is actually in the pipe, not guesswork.

Scrape plates rather than rinsing food scraps down the sink, and never pour cooking fat down a drain — it sets solid as it cools. Use a hair catcher in showers. Flush nothing but toilet paper; wipes labelled flushable are the single biggest cause of preventable blockages we see. If you have mature trees near the sewer line, a periodic camera check is cheap insurance.