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 Petersham
- 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 Petersham
A Georgian village on the flood plain: conservation-area gardens, two centuries of pipework and a water table that sits just under the lawn.
Petersham is the village in TW10 between Richmond Hill and Ham, Georgian houses and Victorian cottages set beside the meadows that the Thames floods on purpose. It is one of the prettiest places we work and, from a drain’s point of view, one of the dampest. The water table here is never far below the grass, and it rises every winter into the backfill around pipes that were laid before anyone had heard of a camera.
The result is silt. A Petersham run with a dropped joint, and most have one by now, lets fine sediment in each wet season until the bore closes. Clearing it is straightforward. Stopping it means finding the joint, and on camera the entry point is usually obvious: a lip of clay with a little delta of silt behind it.
Everything we do here is done with the garden in mind. Surveys run through the existing chambers, repairs are relining rather than digging, and the footage is kept for the insurer, because period houses on a flood plain do end up claiming. We cover Petersham, Ham and the Richmond Hill slopes at any hour, and we promise not to put a van on the meadow.
We cover all of Petersham (TW10) — from Petersham Meadows, Richmond Park (Petersham Gate), River Lane and across Richmond, Ham, Richmond Hill. Being genuinely local means we already know what Petersham's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Petersham →