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 Putney
- 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 Putney
Riverside terraces, mansion blocks on the main roads and big houses up West Hill: a water table at the bottom and long runs at the top.
Putney, SW15, climbs from the river: Victorian terraces along the Lower Richmond Road and the Embankment, Edwardian avenues up West Hill, mansion blocks along the Upper Richmond Road and big houses towards the Heath. The bottom of the hill is a water table story and the top is a long-run story, and the mansion blocks in between are a shared-stack story all of their own.
By the river, old clay joints take on silt each winter as the ground saturates, and the Embankment gullies back up whenever the Thames is high and the surface water system has nowhere to send the rain. We clear the private run and say plainly when the river is the limit rather than the pipe, because clearing a clean drain and invoicing for it is not how we want to be remembered.
The mansion blocks are the local speciality. Many flats, one stack, and a blocked toilet on the second floor that is really a stack problem four floors tall. We check before anyone plunges. Up the hill, the big houses have long runs under mature gardens and the Heath’s trees have found the joints, and the camera finds which joint. We cover Putney and the Heath around the clock from the Barnes and Roehampton side.
We cover all of Putney (SW15) — from Putney High Street, Putney Bridge, the Embankment and across Roehampton, Barnes, Wandsworth. Being genuinely local means we already know what Putney's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Putney →