Blocked drains cleared
across Ryde

Almost always something outside the drain rather than in it. If a bathroom, an ensuite, a dishwasher or a second dwelling was added at any point, the original line is being asked to carry more than it was laid for, and a postwar earthenware drain has no spare capacity to give away. Add sixty-odd years of joints gradually opening and a line that always coped starts failing on the busy days. Nobody changed their habits. The house did.

Because a washing machine is the harshest thing you own, from the drain's point of view. It discharges a large volume in a short burst, where a shower trickles the same water away over several minutes. A line that is marginal will handle the shower and fail on the wash cycle. If your problem shows up mid-wash and nowhere else, that is close to a diagnosis on its own, and it points at capacity rather than an obstruction.

The camera settles it, and the two look completely different on screen. A blockage is a discrete thing sitting in an otherwise sound pipe: roots, a wipe, a build-up. A capacity problem is a line that is structurally fine and simply too small, too flat or too old for what is now going into it, often with joints that have opened and dropped. Clearing fixes the first and does essentially nothing for the second, which is why we film a repeat rather than clearing it again and taking your money twice.

Usually not, and it catches people out when they buy. When a second dwelling goes onto a postwar block it is normally plumbed into the existing house's private line rather than given its own connection at the main, because that is far cheaper to build. So two households share one 70-year-old pipe that was sized for one, a blockage affects both, and there is rarely any paperwork recording it. We put a camera through and tell you how it is genuinely connected.

Because they are assembled from short lengths, so a 1950s run has a joint roughly every metre, and the joint is the weak point rather than the pipe. Ground movement works them loose over decades and roots find the gap the moment there is one. The pipe barrel can be perfectly sound while the line as a whole has dozens of small openings. Sixty-five to seventy-five years is simply where earthenware gets to.

Rarely, and on an old line they do harm. They sit on top of the obstruction rather than passing through it, they generate heat, and in aged earthenware and cast iron they attack the pipe about as readily as the blockage. Against a capacity problem they achieve nothing at all, because there is nothing there to dissolve. If somebody has already poured one in, please say so when you ring rather than after we open the line.

A standard clear through an existing access point is $150 to $400. A camera inspection is $250 to $450 with the footage handed to you, and on a drain that keeps returning that is the money worth spending. A jetter on a stubborn or root-filled line is $400 to $700. If we think clearing will only buy you a few months, we say so before doing it rather than afterwards.