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 Fulham
- 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 Fulham
Victorian terraces dug out, extended and split into flats: more kitchens per drain than almost anywhere in London.
Fulham, SW6, is Victorian terraces almost end to end, from Bishops Park up to the Fulham Road, and almost every one of them has been altered: side returns filled in, basements dug out, lofts converted, the whole house split into flats. Under all that is the original clay drain, laid in the 1880s for one family and one sink, and asked today to take four kitchens, five bathrooms and a basement shower. It copes, until it does not, and the basement flat is where it stops coping first.
So Fulham is a shared-run town. We clear from the external chamber, jet rather than rod because a hole through the grease lasts a month and a clean pipe lasts years, and we give the freeholder a plain account of what came out, because the next conversation in a converted house is always about who pays.
We also spend a lot of time here before building work. Basement digs and side-return extensions in SW6 very often go straight over the run, and a camera survey first is the cheapest insurance a Fulham renovation can buy. The riverside streets add a high water table and the odd flooded lower-ground room that turns out not to be a drain at all. We cover Fulham and Parsons Green at any hour from the Putney and Hammersmith side.
We cover all of Fulham (SW6) — from Fulham Broadway, Parsons Green, Bishops Park and across Putney, Hammersmith, Parsons Green. Being genuinely local means we already know what Fulham's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Fulham →