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 Esher
- 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 Esher
Large plots, long private runs and a lot of rebuilding: the drains in Esher are either brand new or very old, and both kinds block.
Esher, KT10, is big houses on big plots between Sandown Park and the Claremont estate, with Edwardian and 1930s homes in Claygate and Hinchley Wood and a constant programme of rebuilding and extending across the whole area. From underground, the town is two kinds of drain. The old ones are 1930s clay runs that have had ninety years of clay-soil movement. The new ones are plastic, laid last year, and already blocked by builders’ debris or a joint that was never glued.
Both kinds have the same complication: length. An Esher private drain can run forty metres from the house to the road, under lawns, driveways and the occasional tennis court, with a few changes of direction along the way. A blockage halfway down is nowhere near any gully and no rod will reach it. We locate it with the camera first, clear it from the right chamber, and only then talk about what caused it.
We also do a lot of pre-build work here. Before a basement, an extension or a new drive goes in, a survey tells you what the run looks like and whether you are about to build over a problem. We reline rather than dig wherever we can, because nobody wants a trench through an Esher garden. We cover Esher, Claygate and Hinchley Wood at any hour.
We cover all of Esher (KT10) — from Esher High Street, Sandown Park, Claremont Landscape Garden and across Claygate, Hinchley Wood, Thames Ditton. Being genuinely local means we already know what Esher's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Esher →