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 Brentford
- 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 Brentford
New-build flat country: communal stacks, macerators and wet wipes at apartment-block scale.
Brentford is the newest drainage on our patch and, against every stereotype in this trade, new does not mean trouble-free. The waterside towers and the stadium-quarter developments have filled TW8 with thousands of modern flats, and modern flats mean communal soil stacks: one vertical pipe serving ten kitchens and ten bathrooms. One resident’s “flushable” wipes plus one ground-floor bend equals a blockage with a distribution list. A CCTV drain survey can separate a one-off obstruction from a damaged joint or badly laid run. The camera doesn’t lie. It’s one of the many things we love about it.
Basement car parks and undercrofts add pumped drainage and macerators to the mix, kit that older TW postcodes simply doesn’t have, and which fails at apartment-block scale when it fails. Planned inspection and drain jetting give block managers a chance to deal with grease, scale and debris before the emergency version of the same visit.
Old Brentford is still here too: the terraces off the High Street and around Boston Manor run on Victorian clay, and the canal and Brent keep the ground interesting where old pipes meet new developments. Flat, house or whole block, TW8 is covered 24/7, one number, prices agreed before we start.
For the two ends of TW8, see what can go wrong with new-build drains during construction and what actually forms inside grease-heavy shared pipework.
We cover all of Brentford (TW8) — from Brentford waterside, the Grand Union Canal, Gtech Community Stadium and across Isleworth, Kew (over the bridge), Chiswick. Being genuinely local means we already know what Brentford's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Brentford →