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 Ealing
- 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 Ealing
The Queen of the Suburbs on heavy clay: big Victorian villas with long runs, 1930s streets in Northfields, and the Common's trees exploring all of it.
Ealing, W5 and W13, grew as the Queen of the Suburbs in the late Victorian and Edwardian years: tall red-brick villas around the Common and Haven Green, long terraces off the Uxbridge Road, 1930s semis in Northfields and West Ealing, and lately a ring of new apartment blocks around the Broadway. The ground is heavy London clay, which swells and shrinks with the seasons and has spent a century easing Ealing’s pipe joints apart.
The villas are the classic call. Big gardens, long private runs, and the plane and lime trees that line every avenue sending roots into every opened joint. A drain that blocks every year is telling you about a specific joint and a specific tree, and the camera names both. Clearing buys a season; cutting the roots and lining the joint buys a generation.
Northfields and West Ealing are the interwar story: shallow runs under long gardens, grease and silt settling on a gentle fall, and extensions going over the run without anyone looking first. We survey before building work, jet rather than rod on anything that has blocked twice, and reline rather than dig wherever a garden or a tiled path is in the way. We cover Ealing, Northfields and Hanwell at any hour from the Brentford side of our patch.
We cover all of Ealing (W5, W13) — from Ealing Broadway, Ealing Common, Walpole Park and across Acton, Hanwell, Brentford. Being genuinely local means we already know what Ealing's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Ealing →