Shared runs under converted Fulham houses carry a serious grease load and block on a timetable. Jetting strips the pipe back to clean clay so there is nothing for the next lot to stick to, which in a four-flat house is the difference between an annual call and a quarterly one.
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 Fulham
- 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 Fulham
Victorian terraces dug out, extended and split into flats: more kitchens per drain than almost anywhere in London.
Fulham, SW6, is Victorian terraces almost end to end, from Bishops Park up to the Fulham Road, and almost every one of them has been altered: side returns filled in, basements dug out, lofts converted, the whole house split into flats. Under all that is the original clay drain, laid in the 1880s for one family and one sink, and asked today to take four kitchens, five bathrooms and a basement shower. It copes, until it does not, and the basement flat is where it stops coping first.
So Fulham is a shared-run town. We clear from the external chamber, jet rather than rod because a hole through the grease lasts a month and a clean pipe lasts years, and we give the freeholder a plain account of what came out, because the next conversation in a converted house is always about who pays.
We also spend a lot of time here before building work. Basement digs and side-return extensions in SW6 very often go straight over the run, and a camera survey first is the cheapest insurance a Fulham renovation can buy. The riverside streets add a high water table and the odd flooded lower-ground room that turns out not to be a drain at all. We cover Fulham and Parsons Green at any hour from the Putney and Hammersmith side.
We cover all of Fulham (SW6) — from Fulham Broadway, Parsons Green, Bishops Park and across Putney, Hammersmith, Parsons Green. Being genuinely local means we already know what Fulham's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Fulham →