Blocked Drains Barnet, Same Day Clearance, No VAT

The single most common cause of recurring blockage in EN5, EN4, N20, N14 and N11. Victorian and Edwardian drains were laid in salt glazed clay, with hand pointed mortar joints. Eighty plus years of London plane, lime, sycamore, willow and bay tree roots have worked into those joints in search of moisture and nutrients. By the time the customer notices a slow drain, the roots are usually already a substantial mat inside the pipe.

We cut roots out using a powered cutter on a flexible drive, follow up with a high pressure jet wash to clear the debris, and CCTV survey the run after to confirm the joint is no longer leaking water into the surrounding soil. Where the joint itself has failed we recommend a localised patch repair, which we can carry out without excavation. We will not sell you a full pipe replacement when a £350 patch will do the same job for fifteen years.

Roughly one in eight Barnet calls. The customer hears scratching in the cavity wall, finds droppings in the loft or the back of a kitchen cupboard, and the local authority pest controller has set traps that are not solving the problem. The reason is that the rodent is not living in the building. It is coming up the soil pipe from a defective drain run, into the house, eating, going back down. Trapping the building does nothing. You have to seal the drain.

Ken’s pest qualification is the reason this works. We CCTV the run, identify the entry point (almost always a broken section of clay pipe under the back garden, an open gully trap, or a redundant pipe stub left behind from a 1970s extension), and seal it permanently. The rodent activity stops within days. We do not sub contract this. One van, one engineer, one bill. See our full rat ingress process ›

The fastest growing cause of household blockage in the borough. The labels say flushable. They are not. Wet wipes do not break down in the way toilet tissue does. They reach the first bend or the first tree root and they snag. Over a few weeks they become a fatberg in miniature.

We clear these with rods or a small jet, depending on how compacted the mass has become. The fix is straightforward. The behaviour change is the harder bit. We leave the customer with a single sheet of paper explaining what is and is not safe to flush. The number of repeat callouts on this issue has fallen sharply since we started doing that.

The boundary inspection chamber, where the private drain run meets the public sewer in the road, is the highest stress point in any domestic drainage system. Heavy traffic, soil settlement, and tree root pressure combine on that single junction. In Barnet’s older streets we see partial or full collapses of the last metre of clay pipe before the chamber roughly twice a month.

Where the collapse is total we lift, replace and re bed the section. Where it is partial we install a localised patch liner that bonds to the existing pipe and forms a new internal surface, without excavation, in under three hours. We CCTV survey the run before and after, so the customer has documented evidence of what was wrong and what was done. Useful for buildings insurance claims and Homebuyer’s Surveys.

Barnet has a number of streets where the gradient is enough to push surface water from the road, through the front garden, into a private gully and from there into the foul drain. Once the foul drain is overloaded with surface water, the household sinks and toilets start to back up. The customer thinks they have a blocked drain. They actually have a misconnection.

We trace the flow path with dye and CCTV, identify the misconnection, and either separate the surface and foul runs (the long term fix) or install a non return valve at the gully (the immediate fix). We will give the customer both costed options on the day so they can decide which one fits the budget.