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
- 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
Victorian cottages and waterworks-era streets with some of the oldest pipes on our patch.
Hampton has water history like nowhere else on our patch. The great Victorian waterworks along the riverfront supplied London its drinking water, and the streets of cottages built around them in the 1850s to 1890s got, naturally, Victorian drains. Parts of Hampton village and Hampton Hill are running waste through some of the oldest clay pipework we ever put a camera into, and honestly, the footage is beautiful. Hand-laid brick inspection chambers turn up under Hampton gardens like little cathedrals. (We photograph them. For the archive. It’s normal.)
Age brings character, and character brings blockages: lime-mortar joints that roots walk straight through, gentle sags where 150 years of ground settlement has let a pipe dip and collect grease, and the odd surprise where a long-gone builder connected something creatively. Between the cottages, the between-wars semis towards Hampton Hill add the usual extension-overload problem, kitchens working drains that were sized for a scullery.
The Bushy Park side contributes magnificent trees and their equally magnificent root systems. All of TW12, village to Hampton Wick borders, is covered 24/7. Old pipes deserve engineers who actually like them, and that is, without competition, us.
We cover all of Hampton (TW12) — from Hampton Court (up the road), Bushy Park, Hampton village and across Hampton Hill, Hampton Wick, Teddington. Being genuinely local means we already know what Hampton's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Hampton →