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 Roehampton
- 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 Roehampton
Post-war estate drainage on one side of Roehampton Lane, interwar villas and university grounds on the other, and both kinds block in their own way.
Roehampton is the western end of SW15, where Putney Heath meets Richmond Park, and it is really two drainage systems. On one side of Roehampton Lane is the Alton Estate, one of the largest post-war estates in London, where blocks and maisonettes share stacks and underground runs and a blockage is a communal event. On the other are interwar villas, the university’s grounds and newer flats, draining through older clay under big gardens with the park’s trees alongside.
Estate calls are about finding the right pipe. A ground-floor flat backing up is usually a shared run or a stack serving several homes, and the fix is to clear it from the correct chamber and give the managing agent a straight account of what was in it, so the next flush is somebody else’s lesson. We do not plunge shared stacks. It sends the problem upstairs.
Villa calls are about roots and old joints. Richmond Park’s oaks and the mature gardens along the lane have been exploring the clay for a century, and the camera settles whether a repeat blockage is roots, a dropped joint or a collapse. We cover all of Roehampton from the Putney and Barnes side, around the clock.
We cover all of Roehampton (SW15) — from Roehampton University, the Alton Estate, Richmond Park (Roehampton Gate) and across Putney, Barnes, Richmond Park. Being genuinely local means we already know what Roehampton's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Roehampton →