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 Wimbledon
- 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 Wimbledon
Two towns in one postcode: the Village on the hill with long runs under big gardens, and the terraces and flats below it on shared Victorian clay.
Wimbledon, SW19, is two places with different pipes. Up the hill, the Village and the Common are large Victorian and Edwardian houses on big plots, with long private runs, mature gardens and the Common’s oaks exploring every joint. Down the hill, the Broadway, South Wimbledon and Wimbledon Park are Victorian and Edwardian terraces, many converted into flats, plus post-war estates and new blocks around the station. We ask which Wimbledon you are in before we choose the van.
Hill calls are about distance and roots. A blockage on a thirty-metre run under a lawn is nowhere near a gully, rods will not reach it, and the camera has to find it first. Repeat blockages are almost always a root mat at a joint the clay soil has opened, and lining that joint is what ends the annual visit. With basements and extensions going in all over the hill, a survey before the works is the cheapest decision in the project.
Down-the-hill calls are about sharing. Converted terraces put four kitchens on one Victorian run and the ground-floor flat is the first to know when the top flat pours the fat away. We clear from the external chamber, jet rather than rod, and give the freeholder footage rather than an opinion. We cover all of SW19 at any hour from the Putney and Kingston side of our patch.
We cover all of Wimbledon (SW19) — from Wimbledon Village, the Common, the Broadway and across Southfields, Raynes Park, Putney. Being genuinely local means we already know what Wimbledon's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Wimbledon →