Putney's riverside terraces along the Lower Richmond Road sit on a high water table that lifts silt into old clay joints every winter, and the Embankment's gullies back up when the Thames is high. We clear the private run and tell you honestly when the river, not the pipe, is the limit.
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 Putney
- 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 Putney
Riverside terraces, mansion blocks on the main roads and big houses up West Hill: a water table at the bottom and long runs at the top.
Putney, SW15, climbs from the river: Victorian terraces along the Lower Richmond Road and the Embankment, Edwardian avenues up West Hill, mansion blocks along the Upper Richmond Road and big houses towards the Heath. The bottom of the hill is a water table story and the top is a long-run story, and the mansion blocks in between are a shared-stack story all of their own.
By the river, old clay joints take on silt each winter as the ground saturates, and the Embankment gullies back up whenever the Thames is high and the surface water system has nowhere to send the rain. We clear the private run and say plainly when the river is the limit rather than the pipe, because clearing a clean drain and invoicing for it is not how we want to be remembered.
The mansion blocks are the local speciality. Many flats, one stack, and a blocked toilet on the second floor that is really a stack problem four floors tall. We check before anyone plunges. Up the hill, the big houses have long runs under mature gardens and the Heath’s trees have found the joints, and the camera finds which joint. We cover Putney and the Heath around the clock from the Barnes and Roehampton side.
We cover all of Putney (SW15) — from Putney High Street, Putney Bridge, the Embankment and across Roehampton, Barnes, Wandsworth. Being genuinely local means we already know what Putney's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Putney →