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 East Sheen
- 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 East Sheen
Edwardian avenues with long rear gardens and private runs that nobody has looked at since the house was built.
East Sheen is Edwardian suburbia at its most settled: tree-lined avenues between Upper Richmond Road West and the Sheen Gate of Richmond Park, with long rear gardens and houses that have been quietly extended, re-plumbed and re-roofed for a hundred years. The drains, mostly, have not been touched. They are original clay runs that leave the back of the house, travel the length of the garden and meet the sewer under the road, and twenty metres of century-old pipe gives a blockage plenty of places to hide.
Root ingress is the local speciality. The gardens here are full of mature fruit trees, limes and the occasional willow, and every one of them has found the drain at some point. The pattern is familiar: a slow bath, then a gurgle from the downstairs toilet, then one wet morning the outside gully lifts its lid. Clearing it buys a year; lining the entry point buys a generation.
Sheen also has a lot of side returns and kitchen extensions built over the original run, which means access is often through a single chamber near the back door. We carry the kit for long reaches and tight access, and a camera survey here is usually the first time anyone has seen what the house has been standing on. We cover all of SW14 from Mortlake to the park, around the clock.
We cover all of East Sheen (SW14) — from Sheen Common, Upper Richmond Road West, Palewell Common and across Mortlake, Richmond, Barnes. Being genuinely local means we already know what East Sheen's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in East Sheen →