Wandsworth's riverside blocks are new and their drains are plastic, but the first few years of a new block are when builders' debris, grout and wipes find the one shallow bend in the communal run. The ground floor and the car park drains find out first, and the managing agent calls us.
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 Wandsworth
- 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 Wandsworth
A river valley town: the Wandle, a riverside full of new blocks, and Victorian cottages in the Tonsleys on clay runs that predate all of it.
Wandsworth, SW18, runs from the Thames at Wandsworth Town up the Wandle valley to Earlsfield and across to the Common, and the drains come in three distinct generations. The Tonsleys and the streets around the Common are Victorian cottages on original clay. Southfields and Earlsfield add Edwardian houses and 1930s blocks. The riverside has filled with large new developments whose drains are plastic, communal and, for the first few years, full of builders’ leftovers.
New-block calls usually come from a managing agent at an awkward hour: the car park gullies or a ground-floor unit backing up because grout, wipes and a traffic cone’s worth of debris have met at the one shallow bend in the communal run. We clear it, film it and hand over a report that makes the snagging conversation with the developer very short.
Old-house calls are about shallow waste runs and shared clay. Victorian cottages have had bathrooms added wherever they fitted, and the long, nearly flat waste pipe to the stack blocks on hair and wipes long before the drain outside does. The Wandle valley is wet ground, the clay has moved, and the camera finds the joint behind a repeat blockage and plots where your pipe becomes a shared lateral drain. We cover Wandsworth, Earlsfield and Southfields around the clock.
We cover all of Wandsworth (SW18) — from Wandsworth Town, Southside, the Tonsleys and across Putney, Earlsfield, Southfields. Being genuinely local means we already know what Wandsworth's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Wandsworth →