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 Kew
- 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 Kew
Riverside Victorian and Edwardian terraces on clay runs, with the water table rising to meet them every winter.
Kew is Richmond’s quieter neighbour and, under the pavement, its older sibling. The terraces between Kew Green, Sandycombe Road and North Sheen went up in the decades either side of 1900 on salt-glazed clay drains, and those drains still do the job, mostly. What has changed is the ground. The Thames sits at the end of almost every street here, and each winter the water table rises into the backfill around the pipes, lifting silt into any joint that has moved. That is why a Kew gully that behaves all summer backs up in the first wet week of November.
The trees do their part too. Kew’s plane trees and the mature gardens off Lichfield Road push roots towards the one warm, wet thing underground, and a hairline gap in a clay collar is all the invitation they need. We clear root blockages across TW9 every month, and the ones that stay cleared are the ones where the camera found the entry point and the pipe was lined.
There is a practical Kew point as well: a lot of the housing stock here is shared. Semi-detached pairs and terraces often drain into one run before it reaches the sewer, so a blockage in one garden floods the neighbour first. We are used to explaining who pays and why, and to doing the survey that proves it. We are local, we answer at any hour, and a Kew drain is one of our favourite problems.
We cover all of Kew (TW9) — from Kew Gardens, Kew Green, Kew Bridge and across Richmond, North Sheen, Mortlake. Being genuinely local means we already know what Kew's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Kew →