Long, shallow 1930s runs collect silt and grease along the invert and narrow slowly over years. Jetting scours the pipe wall back to bare clay, which is why an Osterley drain that has been jetted stays clear far longer than one that has only been rodded.
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 Osterley
- 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 Osterley
A 1930s suburb on heavy clay: salt-glazed runs under long gardens, and a park full of trees next door.
Osterley is the leafy 1930s corner of TW7, laid out around the Piccadilly line station with the park on one side and the Great West Road on the other. The houses are consistent, the gardens are long, and the drains are salt-glazed clay runs that travel the length of those gardens before they find the sewer. That geometry is the whole story: twenty metres of shallow pipe gives a blockage plenty of room to hide, and a rod from the gully rarely gets there.
The ground does its bit. Osterley sits on London clay, which swells in wet winters and shrinks in dry summers, and ninety years of that has eased the joints apart. A displaced joint catches debris, lets roots in from the park-side trees and, eventually, drops. The camera shows all three stages clearly, and the earlier we see it the cheaper the fix.
We also get called before building work. A lot of Osterley semis are getting extensions over the original run, and a survey first is far cheaper than a collapsed drain under a new kitchen floor. We cover Osterley from Isleworth and Hounslow, at any hour.
We cover all of Osterley (TW7) — from Osterley Park, Osterley station, the Great West Road and across Isleworth, Hounslow, Brentford. Being genuinely local means we already know what Osterley's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Osterley →