How-to
Grease, Wipes and a Traffic Cone: A Week in the Life of a Drain Engineer
A Monday-to-Sunday diary of real drain jobs in the TW area. What caused each blockage, what fixed it, and what it cost. Genuinely educational.
Published 7 July 2026
Grease, Wipes and a Traffic Cone: A Week in the Life of a Drain Engineer
Most people only think about their drains when something goes wrong. A drain engineer thinks about them constantly, lovingly, and with a level of enthusiasm that occasionally concerns his family. Here is one week of real jobs across the TW postcode area. Names changed, blockages very much real.
Monday: The Fatberg That Wasn’t (Hounslow)
The call: Kitchen sink draining slowly for three weeks, now completely stopped.
What the camera found: A solid plug of cooking fat about four metres down the pipe, set hard as candle wax. Not quite a fatberg (those are the cathedral-scale ones you read about in the news), but a very respectable effort. A fatberg, for the uninitiated, is what happens when poured cooking fat cools, solidifies, and bonds with anything else passing through: coffee grounds, food scraps, the occasional wet wipe.
What fixed it: High-pressure water jetting. A jet wash for pipes, essentially. Thirty minutes, pipe clear.
Honest takeaway: Never pour cooking fat down the sink. Let it cool in a jar and bin it. This job costs roughly £80 to £150 for a straightforward kitchen drain unblock.
Tuesday: The Wipes That Lied (Twickenham)
The call: Toilet flushing slowly, then backing up into the shower tray next door.
What the camera found: A dense wad of wet wipes, roughly the size of a small dog, lodged at the first bend past the toilet. The packet said “flushable.” The drain disagreed, firmly.
What fixed it: Drain rods (long, flexible poles joined together to push or break up a blockage) followed by a flush with the jetting hose.
Honest takeaway: No wipe is truly flushable. They do not break down. Bin them. This sort of job runs £80 to £180 depending on how far down the blockage sits.
Wednesday: Tree Roots in Richmond
The call: Outdoor drain backing up in the garden, slow for months.
What the camera found: Fine root tendrils from a nearby silver birch had pushed through a hairline crack in an old clay pipe, then grown into a dense mesh inside the pipe. Root ingress, this is called. It means tree roots have found a way into the drain and are slowly filling it up.
What fixed it: Cutting the roots out with a specialist rotary tool, then a CCTV survey (a camera inspection on a long cable, recorded so you can see exactly what the pipe looks like inside) to check for further cracks.
Honest takeaway: Old clay pipes and trees are a classic combination. If roots have cracked the pipe, you may need pipe relining (a resin sleeve inserted inside the old pipe to seal it without digging), which costs roughly £400 to £900 for a short section. Ignoring it means the roots come back within a year.
Thursday: The Interceptor Trap (Feltham)
The call: Manhole cover overflowing in the front garden of a 1930s semi.
What the camera found: A blocked interceptor trap. An interceptor trap is a water-sealed chamber built into older drainage systems to stop sewer gases travelling back up the pipe into the house. They were standard in inter-war housing and they block regularly. This one had a solid plug of silt and debris in the trap itself.
What fixed it: Clearing the trap by hand, then jetting the downstream pipe.
Honest takeaway: If you live in a pre-war or inter-war property in Feltham, Hounslow or Twickenham, you almost certainly have one of these. Budget £100 to £200 for a clearance.
Friday: The Soakaway (Shepperton)
The call: Surface water pooling badly after rain, not draining away.
What the camera found: The soakaway, which is a buried pit filled with gravel that allows surface water to disperse slowly into the surrounding soil, had silted up completely. The gravel was coated in fine clay and the whole structure had essentially stopped breathing.
What fixed it: Jetting the feed pipe, then excavating and replacing the soakaway with a modern crate system (a plastic honeycomb structure that holds more water and silts up less easily).
Honest takeaway: Soakaway replacement is the bigger end of drainage work. Expect £500 to £1,500 depending on size and access. Worth it if your garden turns into a pond every October.
Saturday: The Traffic Cone (Staines)
The call: Commercial car wash, drain completely blocked, business unable to operate.
What the camera found: A standard orange traffic cone, point-down, perfectly wedged in the main outlet pipe. The camera footage looked like a nature documentary about a very unusual cave formation.
What fixed it: A retrieval tool on the end of the CCTV rig, twenty minutes of careful manoeuvring, and one extremely undignified extraction.
Honest takeaway: Drains near car parks, roads and commercial yards attract all manner of debris. A CCTV survey before you sign a commercial lease is genuinely worth the £150 to £300 it costs.
Sunday: A Quiet One (Hampton)
A slow residential drain, caused by a build-up of hair and soap scum in the shower trap. Fixed in fifteen minutes with a rod and a flush. The engineer was almost disappointed.
Almost.
What This Week Actually Tells You
Every single job above had one thing in common: the customer waited. Weeks, sometimes months. A slow drain is the drain trying to tell you something. The longer you leave it, the harder (and more expensive) the fix becomes.
If your drain is backing up, overflowing or simply slower than it should be, call Drainiacs on 07700 137648. We cover the full TW postcode area, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and we will be there with a camera and a jet before you have time to look up what a fatberg is.