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 Richmond
- 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 Richmond
High-value period property, mature street trees, and root ingress in century-old clay runs.
Richmond’s drains are as period as its houses. The Victorian terraces off Sheen Road, the grand villas on Richmond Hill and the cottages in Petersham mostly run on clay pipework that predates the First World War, and in conservation areas nobody has ever been keen to dig it up. That’s exactly where relining earns its keep: we fix the pipe from the inside and the listed garden wall never knows we were there.
The borough’s magnificent trees are, professionally speaking, our biggest local rival. The planes and horse chestnuts around Richmond Green and the park edges push fine roots into every available pipe joint looking for water, and a root-bound drain re-blocks on a schedule until the ingress point is found and fixed. A CCTV survey here is rarely boring. (For us. We accept this is a niche form of entertainment.)
There’s also a practical Richmond reality: with property values around Richmond Hill and Kew among the highest in the country, foul water backing up into a basement kitchen does eye-watering damage per hour. When something does go wrong, it’s worth it being fixed quickly and properly documented. We’re local, we answer 24/7, and we arrive genuinely pleased to see a difficult drain.
We cover all of Richmond (TW9, TW10) — from Richmond Park, Kew Gardens, Richmond Bridge and across Kew, Petersham, Ham. Being genuinely local means we already know what Richmond's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Richmond →