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 Hammersmith
- 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 Hammersmith
Brackenbury's Victorian terraces, Georgian riverside houses on the Mall, mansion blocks and new towers: four drainage systems in one postcode.
Hammersmith, W6, packs four kinds of drainage into one postcode. Brackenbury Village and the streets around Ravenscourt Park are Victorian terraces on shared clay runs, converted and extended for a century. The Lower and Upper Mall have Georgian and Victorian houses on the river with some of the oldest private drainage in west London. The main roads carry mansion blocks with shared stacks, and the Broadway is ringed with new towers whose communal runs are still finding out what the builders left in them.
Terrace calls are the familiar converted-house story: four kitchens on a pipe laid for one, grease from the top flat, a flooded kitchen in the garden flat. Riverside calls add a high water table that lifts silt into every moved joint each winter, and the question of where a very old private drain becomes Thames Water’s lateral. The camera answers both.
King Street and the Broadway are a grease story. Restaurants and flats above shops on small old pipes produce fatbergs we find professionally fascinating and tenants find expensive, and a planned jetting schedule on a commercial run beats the Saturday-night flood every time. We cover Hammersmith and Brackenbury at any hour from the Chiswick and Barnes side of our patch.
We cover all of Hammersmith (W6) — from Hammersmith Broadway, King Street, Hammersmith Bridge and across Chiswick, Fulham, Shepherd's Bush. Being genuinely local means we already know what Hammersmith's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Hammersmith →