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 Chiswick
- 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 Chiswick
Bedford Park's garden suburb, Strand-on-the-Green's riverside cottages and Grove Park's terraces: conservation-area drains with a river at the end of the street.
Chiswick, W4, borders Brentford and Kew along the river and has some of the most varied housing in west London: Bedford Park, the first garden suburb, with its Victorian houses and mature trees; Georgian and Victorian cottages along the river at Strand-on-the-Green; Edwardian terraces in Grove Park; 1930s semis towards Acton; and new blocks along the High Road. Below ground it is clay runs of every age, a water table that follows the river, and trees that have had a century and a half to find the joints.
The autumn call is the Chiswick classic. A Grove Park or Bedford Park drain that behaved all summer backs up in the first wet November week, because the water table has risen into the backfill and lifted silt into a joint that moved years ago. The camera finds the joint, often with a root tendril already in it, and lining it is what stops the annual repeat.
Bedford Park and Strand-on-the-Green are conservation areas, so we work the way the houses deserve: surveys through the existing chambers, relining rather than excavation, and footage kept for the insurer or the buyer. The High Road’s flats above shops add the grease-and-shared-stack pattern we know from everywhere else. We cover Chiswick, Grove Park and Strand-on-the-Green at any hour from the Brentford and Kew side of our patch.
We cover all of Chiswick (W4) — from Chiswick High Road, Turnham Green, Bedford Park and across Brentford, Kew, Hammersmith. Being genuinely local means we already know what Chiswick's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Chiswick →