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 Kew
- 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 Kew
Riverside Victorian and Edwardian terraces on clay runs, with the water table rising to meet them every winter.
Kew is Richmond’s quieter neighbour and, under the pavement, its older sibling. The terraces between Kew Green, Sandycombe Road and North Sheen went up in the decades either side of 1900 on salt-glazed clay drains, and those drains still do the job, mostly. What has changed is the ground. The Thames sits at the end of almost every street here, and each winter the water table rises into the backfill around the pipes, lifting silt into any joint that has moved. That is why a Kew gully that behaves all summer backs up in the first wet week of November.
The trees do their part too. Kew’s plane trees and the mature gardens off Lichfield Road push roots towards the one warm, wet thing underground, and a hairline gap in a clay collar is all the invitation they need. We clear root blockages across TW9 every month, and the ones that stay cleared are the ones where the camera found the entry point and the pipe was lined.
There is a practical Kew point as well: a lot of the housing stock here is shared. Semi-detached pairs and terraces often drain into one run before it reaches the sewer, so a blockage in one garden floods the neighbour first. We are used to explaining who pays and why, and to doing the survey that proves it. We are local, we answer at any hour, and a Kew drain is one of our favourite problems.
We cover all of Kew (TW9) — from Kew Gardens, Kew Green, Kew Bridge and across Richmond, North Sheen, Mortlake. Being genuinely local means we already know what Kew's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Kew →