A blocked toilet is the most honest emergency in the house. There’s no pretending it isn’t happening, there’s usually a queue forming, and there is a very specific moment of dread just before you look into the bowl and flush. (Don’t flush. See the steps above. We’ve mopped up too many optimists.)
Here’s what makes us different from every other number you could ring: we genuinely don’t mind. Not in the gritted-teeth, “someone’s got to do it” way. Blocked toilets and sinks are quick, solvable, satisfying puzzles, and the person arriving at your door is pleased to be there. No sighing at you, no “what did you put down here then” interrogation. You’re having a bad morning; we’re having a normal Tuesday.
Toilets block on the usual suspects: wet wipes (even the “flushable” ones, which flush in the same sense that a brick technically flies), kids’ toys, air fresheners that dive off the cistern, and too much paper. Most clear in under an hour with the right tools rather than a supermarket plunger.
Sinks are almost always fat and food in the kitchen, or hair and soap in the bathroom, packed into the trap or the first bend. If more than one fixture is draining slowly at once, the problem is further down the line, and we’ll find it rather than just emptying the trap and hoping.
What it costs: most blocked toilets and sinks in the TW area run £80–£160, with out-of-hours visits from £150. Price agreed before we start, fixed when we finish. If it turns out the real problem is the main drain, we’ll show you, explain the options, and never charge twice for one problem.
What to do right now in Barnes
- Don't flush again 'to see'. If the bowl is full, a second flush has exactly one place to go, and it's your bathroom floor.
- Turn off the water to a filling toilet at the isolation valve on the inlet pipe (small screw or lever), or hold the float arm up inside the cistern.
- For a blocked sink, stop the taps and don't reach for caustic soda. It generates heat, can damage the trap, and makes the pipe dangerous to work on.
- Call us. Describing the problem is our job to make easy, and no, whatever it is, it will not be the worst thing we've seen this week.
Blocked Toilet & Sink help, local to Barnes
A low riverside village where the Thames, the common and the water table all have opinions about your drains.
Barnes has the feel of a village and the drainage of one too. It sits on a low, flat bend of the Thames with the common on one side and the river on the other, and the water table here is never far below the lawn. The Georgian terraces around Barnes Pond and the Victorian streets off Church Road drain through clay pipework that has had two hundred years of riverside ground movement to settle into, and settle it has.
What we see most in SW13 is water that has nowhere to go. After a wet week the ground is saturated, the surface water system is working flat out and a private drain that was already half silted simply stops. Then the back gully lifts, the downstairs loo gurgles and somebody rings us at seven in the morning. Clearing it is the easy part. Finding the dropped joint or the root mat that let the silt build up is what stops next month’s call.
The other Barnes reality is shared runs under boundary walls. A lot of the older terraces drain through the neighbour’s garden before they reach the sewer under the street, and blockages here very often turn into a conversation about whose pipe it is. We know the lateral drain rules, we do the camera work that settles the question, and we are happy to explain it to both households. We cover Barnes, Castelnau and the common, day and night.
We cover all of Barnes (SW13) — from Barnes Pond, Barnes Common, Castelnau and across Mortlake, East Sheen, Putney. Being genuinely local means we already know what Barnes's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Barnes →