Ealing's villas around the Common and Haven Green have long private runs under big gardens, and the plane trees that make the area so pleasant have had a century to find the joints. A repeat blockage here is nearly always roots, and the camera shows you exactly which tree.
A blocked drain never fixes itself. It builds. Grease, wipes, roots and forty years of “it’ll be fine” collect in the pipe until one morning the shower is ankle-deep and the kitchen smells like something died under the floor.
Here’s the part we should probably keep to ourselves: we find blockages genuinely interesting. Every blocked drain is a little mystery. Is it a fatberg? Tree roots that found a joint in a Victorian clay pipe? A toy dinosaur? (Real find. His name is Trevor now.) The point is, the job everyone else dreads is the one we turn up excited about, with the right kit to solve it first visit.
We clear the blockage at its source, not just poke it further down the pipe to become next month’s call-out. If more than one drain is backing up at once, that usually points to the main run between your house and the sewer, and we handle that too.
What it costs: most straightforward domestic blockages in the TW area run £90–£180, rising to £150–£250 for middle-of-the-night call-outs. You get a price on the phone or at the door before any work starts, and it doesn’t change when we’re covered in the evidence.
One honest note: standing water from a blocked drain is a health hazard, and foul water backing up indoors can damage floors and walls quickly. The sooner it’s cleared, the smaller the bill. Day or night, we answer.
What to do right now in Ealing
- Stop running water into the affected drain, sink or toilet. Every litre you add has nowhere to go.
- If an outside gully is overflowing, keep children and pets away from the standing water.
- Don't pour chemical unblocker into a fully blocked drain. It sits in the pipe, and whoever clears it (us, happily) gets a face full of it.
- Call us. We'll give you an honest ETA and talk you through anything urgent while we're on the way.
Blocked Drain help, local to Ealing
The Queen of the Suburbs on heavy clay: big Victorian villas with long runs, 1930s streets in Northfields, and the Common's trees exploring all of it.
Ealing, W5 and W13, grew as the Queen of the Suburbs in the late Victorian and Edwardian years: tall red-brick villas around the Common and Haven Green, long terraces off the Uxbridge Road, 1930s semis in Northfields and West Ealing, and lately a ring of new apartment blocks around the Broadway. The ground is heavy London clay, which swells and shrinks with the seasons and has spent a century easing Ealing’s pipe joints apart.
The villas are the classic call. Big gardens, long private runs, and the plane and lime trees that line every avenue sending roots into every opened joint. A drain that blocks every year is telling you about a specific joint and a specific tree, and the camera names both. Clearing buys a season; cutting the roots and lining the joint buys a generation.
Northfields and West Ealing are the interwar story: shallow runs under long gardens, grease and silt settling on a gentle fall, and extensions going over the run without anyone looking first. We survey before building work, jet rather than rod on anything that has blocked twice, and reline rather than dig wherever a garden or a tiled path is in the way. We cover Ealing, Northfields and Hanwell at any hour from the Brentford side of our patch.
We cover all of Ealing (W5, W13) — from Ealing Broadway, Ealing Common, Walpole Park and across Acton, Hanwell, Brentford. Being genuinely local means we already know what Ealing's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Ealing →