Converted villas with several kitchens need jetting, not rodding. Rods punch a hole through the grease; a jet strips the pipe wall back to clean clay so the run has nothing to build on, and in a shared building that is the difference between an annual call 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 Surbiton
- 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 Surbiton
Victorian villas turned into flats: one house, four kitchens and a single clay run that was never asked.
Surbiton is the Surrey bank’s Victorian suburb, KT5 and KT6, built around the railway and the river, with avenues of tall villas off Victoria Road and 1930s semis filling Berrylands and the edge of Tolworth. Most of the villas are flats now, and that conversion is the whole drainage story. One house, built for one family and one scullery sink, now has four kitchens, four bathrooms and the same single clay run to the sewer it had in 1890.
So Surbiton blocks from the top down and floods from the bottom up. Grease and wipes from the upper flats collect in the one shared run, and the ground-floor flat is the first to know. We clear from the external chamber, jet rather than rod because a hole through the grease lasts a month and a clean pipe lasts years, and we give the freeholder or managing agent a straight account of what came out, since the next conversation is about who pays.
The avenues’ plane trees take care of the rest, finding every joint that a century of ground movement has opened. We cover Surbiton, Berrylands and Long Ditton at any hour from the Kingston side of our patch.
We cover all of Surbiton (KT5, KT6) — from Surbiton station, Victoria Road, Claremont Gardens and across Kingston upon Thames, Tolworth, Long Ditton. Being genuinely local means we already know what Surbiton's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Surbiton →