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 Wandsworth
- 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 Wandsworth
A river valley town: the Wandle, a riverside full of new blocks, and Victorian cottages in the Tonsleys on clay runs that predate all of it.
Wandsworth, SW18, runs from the Thames at Wandsworth Town up the Wandle valley to Earlsfield and across to the Common, and the drains come in three distinct generations. The Tonsleys and the streets around the Common are Victorian cottages on original clay. Southfields and Earlsfield add Edwardian houses and 1930s blocks. The riverside has filled with large new developments whose drains are plastic, communal and, for the first few years, full of builders’ leftovers.
New-block calls usually come from a managing agent at an awkward hour: the car park gullies or a ground-floor unit backing up because grout, wipes and a traffic cone’s worth of debris have met at the one shallow bend in the communal run. We clear it, film it and hand over a report that makes the snagging conversation with the developer very short.
Old-house calls are about shallow waste runs and shared clay. Victorian cottages have had bathrooms added wherever they fitted, and the long, nearly flat waste pipe to the stack blocks on hair and wipes long before the drain outside does. The Wandle valley is wet ground, the clay has moved, and the camera finds the joint behind a repeat blockage and plots where your pipe becomes a shared lateral drain. We cover Wandsworth, Earlsfield and Southfields around the clock.
We cover all of Wandsworth (SW18) — from Wandsworth Town, Southside, the Tonsleys and across Putney, Earlsfield, Southfields. Being genuinely local means we already know what Wandsworth's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Wandsworth →