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 Sunbury
- 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 Sunbury
Two Sunburys, two drain problems: 60s estate runs upstairs, riverside village pipes below.
Sunbury is really two places, and their drains prove it. Upper Sunbury, around Sunbury Cross and the A308, is 1960s and 70s estate housing: long shared drain runs, plastic-into-clay junctions, and inspection covers distributed with what we can only describe as playful randomness. Blockages here love the junction boxes where several properties’ waste meets, which means your blocked drain is often technically your neighbour’s blocked drain. The camera sorts out the whodunnit without anyone falling out over the fence.
Lower Sunbury, the village end by the Thames and the lock, is a different animal: older cottages and villas with older pipework, mature gardens whose roots have opinions, and the same close-to-the-river water table that keeps all riverside drains working harder than inland ones. It’s also home to some of the best-looking manhole covers on our patch, a sentence we stand behind.
From Kempton Park to the lock, TW16 is covered 24/7. We know which end of Sunbury you’re calling from, what your drains are probably made of, and we’ll give you an honest ETA and a fixed price before anything starts.
We cover all of Sunbury (TW16) — from Sunbury Cross, Lower Sunbury village, Sunbury Lock and across Shepperton, Hampton, Ashford. Being genuinely local means we already know what Sunbury's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Sunbury →