Sometimes a drain isn’t blocked, it’s broken. Clay pipes crack, joints get pushed apart by tree roots or traffic, and old mortar simply gives up after a century of service. The tell-tale signs: a drain that keeps re-blocking after every clear, a permanently damp patch of garden, an unexplained dip in the driveway, or new visitors of the whiskered variety.
The good news, and we mean properly good: most broken drains no longer need digging up. Relining inserts a resin-soaked liner into the existing pipe and cures it in place, leaving a smooth new structural pipe inside the old one. No trench through your garden, no jackhammer through the patio, done in a day for most domestic repairs. (We think watching a liner cure is fascinating. You don’t have to. That’s what we’re for.)
How we play it straight:
- Survey first, always. We never quote structural work from a hunch. The CCTV survey shows you the damage on screen, so you’re deciding from evidence, not from a salesman’s frown.
- Repair options in plain English. A localised patch repair (£300–£600) fixes a single cracked section. Full relining runs £400–£600 per metre. Excavation is the last resort, and if someone quotes you a dig without showing you camera footage, get a second opinion. Ideally ours.
- Insurance help. Accidental drain damage is covered by many buildings policies, and we provide the survey footage and written report your insurer needs. If the damage has caused a leak or water damage inside the house, that side is a plumber-and-insurance job, and our friends at Emergency Plumbers TW handle exactly that, 24/7.
A cracked drain left alone becomes a collapsed drain, and a collapsed drain becomes a hole in the ground with your name on the invoice. Catch it at the crack stage.
What to do right now in Heston
- Signs of a broken drain: one patch of lawn that's always soggy, a new sinkhole or dip in the drive, rats appearing, or a drain that re-blocks within weeks of being cleared.
- Don't panic about the word 'collapsed'. Most damage is a crack or a displaced joint, and most of it can be fixed without excavation.
- If a blocked or broken drain has already flooded part of your home, photograph everything before cleaning up. Your insurer will want the evidence.
Drain Repair & Relining help, local to Heston
Interwar semis, a lot of HMOs and converted houses, and drains that now serve twice the households they were laid for.
Heston is the northern half of Hounslow, TW5, between the A4 and the M4, a suburb of interwar semis and terraces that has quietly become one of the most densely occupied parts of the borough. Houses built for one family now hold two or three households, and the drains underneath them were never consulted.
That is the Heston pattern. A clay run laid for one kitchen now takes three, the grease load has tripled, the wipes have arrived, and a pipe that behaved for seventy years blocks twice a winter. Clearing it is easy. The useful part of the visit is telling the landlord what the run can actually cope with, and which of the added bathrooms is on a long, shallow waste that will keep blocking until it is re-laid.
We do a lot of landlord work here as a result: surveys before a tenancy starts, surveys when a deposit dispute needs a referee, and clearances with a written account of what came out. Tenants can call us directly too. We cover Heston, Cranford and Lampton around the clock from our Hounslow side.
We cover all of Heston (TW5) — from Heston Road, Heston Park, the M4 at Heston and across Hounslow, Cranford, Osterley. Being genuinely local means we already know what Heston's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Heston →