High-pressure water jetting is the most satisfying thing we do, and given how much we enjoy the rest of the job, that’s a serious claim. A jetting nozzle runs at up to 3,000 psi and doesn’t just punch a hole through a blockage the way a rod does. It strips the pipe wall back to bare clay or plastic: grease, soap scale, root fibres, the lot, flushed out and gone.
Think of rodding as squeezing past the fatberg and jetting as evicting it.
When jetting is the right call:
- Grease and fat build-up in kitchen runs. This is most TW blockages. Grease doesn’t block a pipe overnight; it narrows it for years, and jetting resets the clock to day one.
- Root ingress. Fine roots from street trees and mature gardens find their way into pipe joints (a speciality of the leafier TW streets). Jetting cuts them back cleanly. If they’ve cracked the pipe, we’ll show you on camera and talk repair options honestly.
- Recurring blockages. If you’re on first-name terms with a plunger, the pipe is narrowed somewhere. One proper jet is cheaper than four call-outs.
- Scale in older pipes. Hard south-west London water leaves limescale in cast iron and clay runs. Jetting removes it without digging anything up.
What it costs: typical domestic jetting in the TW area runs £150–£300 depending on the length and state of the run. Price agreed up front, before the van door even opens. If a blockage clears with simpler kit, we use the simpler kit and charge for that instead.
What to do right now in Barnes
- If the drain is completely blocked and backing up, stop adding water and call us. Jetting is usually how we'll clear it.
- Recurring slow drains are the classic sign a pipe needs jetting rather than another bottle of one-shot unblocker.
- Don't rent a pressure washer and improvise. Domestic washers can't reach the blockage and the wrong nozzle can damage older pipes.
Drain Jetting help, local to Barnes
A low riverside village where the Thames, the common and the water table all have opinions about your drains.
Barnes has the feel of a village and the drainage of one too. It sits on a low, flat bend of the Thames with the common on one side and the river on the other, and the water table here is never far below the lawn. The Georgian terraces around Barnes Pond and the Victorian streets off Church Road drain through clay pipework that has had two hundred years of riverside ground movement to settle into, and settle it has.
What we see most in SW13 is water that has nowhere to go. After a wet week the ground is saturated, the surface water system is working flat out and a private drain that was already half silted simply stops. Then the back gully lifts, the downstairs loo gurgles and somebody rings us at seven in the morning. Clearing it is the easy part. Finding the dropped joint or the root mat that let the silt build up is what stops next month’s call.
The other Barnes reality is shared runs under boundary walls. A lot of the older terraces drain through the neighbour’s garden before they reach the sewer under the street, and blockages here very often turn into a conversation about whose pipe it is. We know the lateral drain rules, we do the camera work that settles the question, and we are happy to explain it to both households. We cover Barnes, Castelnau and the common, day and night.
We cover all of Barnes (SW13) — from Barnes Pond, Barnes Common, Castelnau and across Mortlake, East Sheen, Putney. Being genuinely local means we already know what Barnes's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Barnes →