Shallow falls and long runs are exactly what jetting is for. A rod clears a plug; a jet scours thirty metres of pipe wall back to bare clay so the silt has nothing to build on, and in Strawberry Hill that is the difference between an annual visit and a one-off.
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 Strawberry Hill
- 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 Strawberry Hill
Edwardian and 1930s semis on the slope down to the river, where a long run and a shallow fall meet mature street trees.
Strawberry Hill is the leafy stretch of TW1 between Twickenham and Teddington, named for Horace Walpole’s Gothic house and built up, mostly, in the Edwardian and interwar years. From a drainage point of view it has a particular character: decent-sized semis on generous plots, long private drains running from the back of the house to the sewer, and a shallow gradient down towards the Thames that never quite gives the water the push it needs.
That shallow fall is the local culprit. A clay run with a gentle slope lets grease and silt settle on the invert instead of washing through, and over a few years the bore narrows until one Sunday it closes. The street trees finish the job: the limes and cherries that make Waldegrave Road and its neighbours so pleasant above ground have been exploring the pipe joints beneath them for a century.
We also see a lot of extension work here, with new kitchens and side returns built over original runs that nobody surveyed first. If you are about to build, a camera survey costs a fraction of discovering the problem after the slab is poured. We are based in Twickenham, so Strawberry Hill is a few minutes away at any hour, and a long, lazy drain is something we genuinely enjoy sorting out properly.
We cover all of Strawberry Hill (TW1, TW2) — from Strawberry Hill House, St Mary's University, Waldegrave Road and across Twickenham, Teddington, Whitton. Being genuinely local means we already know what Strawberry Hill's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Strawberry Hill →