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 Chessington
- 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 Chessington
Post-war semis and bungalows on London clay at the edge of the borough: shallow runs, big gardens and soakaways that have quietly failed.
Chessington, KT9, is the southern edge of the Kingston borough, a spread of 1930s and post-war semis, bungalows and estates between Hook and the Surrey countryside, with a theme park on the end for good measure. Below ground it is London clay, shallow pipework and, more than anywhere else we work, soakaways.
Soakaways are the Chessington twist. A lot of the houses send rainwater into a rubble pit in the garden rather than the sewer, and after fifty or sixty years those pits have silted solid. The downpipe backs up, the gully overflows, and everyone assumes the drain is blocked. Half the time it is the soakaway that has failed, and we check which system has given up before anyone pays to clear the wrong one. We find the honest answer more satisfying than the invoice.
The foul drains have the usual clay-soil story: shallow runs under big gardens, joints opened by seasonal movement, roots from the hedges and the park. The camera settles whether it is a dropped joint or a collapse, and on the estates it shows where your pipe becomes a shared lateral drain and stops being your bill. We cover Chessington and Hook around the clock, relining rather than digging wherever the run goes under something you love.
We cover all of Chessington (KT9) — from Chessington World of Adventures, Hook Road, North Parade and across Tolworth, Hook, Claygate. Being genuinely local means we already know what Chessington's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Chessington →