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 East Sheen
- 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 East Sheen
Edwardian avenues with long rear gardens and private runs that nobody has looked at since the house was built.
East Sheen is Edwardian suburbia at its most settled: tree-lined avenues between Upper Richmond Road West and the Sheen Gate of Richmond Park, with long rear gardens and houses that have been quietly extended, re-plumbed and re-roofed for a hundred years. The drains, mostly, have not been touched. They are original clay runs that leave the back of the house, travel the length of the garden and meet the sewer under the road, and twenty metres of century-old pipe gives a blockage plenty of places to hide.
Root ingress is the local speciality. The gardens here are full of mature fruit trees, limes and the occasional willow, and every one of them has found the drain at some point. The pattern is familiar: a slow bath, then a gurgle from the downstairs toilet, then one wet morning the outside gully lifts its lid. Clearing it buys a year; lining the entry point buys a generation.
Sheen also has a lot of side returns and kitchen extensions built over the original run, which means access is often through a single chamber near the back door. We carry the kit for long reaches and tight access, and a camera survey here is usually the first time anyone has seen what the house has been standing on. We cover all of SW14 from Mortlake to the park, around the clock.
We cover all of East Sheen (SW14) — from Sheen Common, Upper Richmond Road West, Palewell Common and across Mortlake, Richmond, Barnes. Being genuinely local means we already know what East Sheen's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in East Sheen →