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 Hampton Wick
- 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 Hampton Wick
Riverside village at the foot of Kingston Bridge: a high water table, old clay and the occasional sewer surcharge when the river is up.
Hampton Wick is the village on the Middlesex bank at the foot of Kingston Bridge, a KT1 postcode on the TW side of the river. Cottages, riverside terraces and the bigger houses along the park edge all drain through clay runs laid in the Victorian build-out, and all of it sits a few feet above a river that has opinions about the water table.
That shows up in two ways. In dry weather, Hampton Wick drains behave. In a wet week the ground is saturated, the riverside sewer is working hard, and any run that is already half silted gives up. A gully that overflows only in a storm is the classic local call, and the honest answer is sometimes that the private run is fine and the public sewer is surcharging, which is Thames Water’s problem and costs you nothing. We will tell you which.
The other local theme is boundaries. Village plots are small and the old runs cross them freely, so most Hampton Wick blockages involve two households and a question about whose pipe it is. We plot the lateral drain line onto the camera footage so that question gets a factual answer. We cover Hampton Wick day and night from Teddington and Kingston.
We cover all of Hampton Wick (KT1) — from Kingston Bridge, Bushy Park, Hampton Wick station and across Kingston upon Thames, Teddington, Hampton Court. Being genuinely local means we already know what Hampton Wick's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Hampton Wick →