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 Strawberry Hill
- 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 Strawberry Hill
Edwardian and 1930s semis on the slope down to the river, where a long run and a shallow fall meet mature street trees.
Strawberry Hill is the leafy stretch of TW1 between Twickenham and Teddington, named for Horace Walpole’s Gothic house and built up, mostly, in the Edwardian and interwar years. From a drainage point of view it has a particular character: decent-sized semis on generous plots, long private drains running from the back of the house to the sewer, and a shallow gradient down towards the Thames that never quite gives the water the push it needs.
That shallow fall is the local culprit. A clay run with a gentle slope lets grease and silt settle on the invert instead of washing through, and over a few years the bore narrows until one Sunday it closes. The street trees finish the job: the limes and cherries that make Waldegrave Road and its neighbours so pleasant above ground have been exploring the pipe joints beneath them for a century.
We also see a lot of extension work here, with new kitchens and side returns built over original runs that nobody surveyed first. If you are about to build, a camera survey costs a fraction of discovering the problem after the slab is poured. We are based in Twickenham, so Strawberry Hill is a few minutes away at any hour, and a long, lazy drain is something we genuinely enjoy sorting out properly.
We cover all of Strawberry Hill (TW1, TW2) — from Strawberry Hill House, St Mary's University, Waldegrave Road and across Twickenham, Teddington, Whitton. Being genuinely local means we already know what Strawberry Hill's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Strawberry Hill →