Blocked Sink or Drain | Fast Clearance, Herts & Beds

Blocked sinks, baths, showers and outside drains cleared across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. Call 01462 506 374 or book a slot.

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Kitchen and bathroom block for completely different reasons

Worth knowing, because the fix is different and so is the prevention.

Drainage engineers jetting a blocked drain from a roadside manhole — Jetting clears the blockage. A camera tells you why it happened.

Kitchen sinks block with fat. Cooking oil and grease go down warm and liquid, then cool in the horizontal run under the floor and set. Each time, the bore narrows a little more. Food debris then catches on what is already there. Thames Water attributes 28% of the blockages it clears, more than 20,000 a year, to fats, oils and greases, at a cost of up to £11 million.

Bathroom sinks, baths and showers block with hair and soap scum. Hair catches in the trap or on the waste grating, and in a very hard water area like ours the soap reacts with the calcium and leaves a greasy solid that binds it all together. That is the real reason bathroom wastes across Hertfordshire silt up faster than they do in soft water parts of the country.

Detection equipment set up on a Vantage job

Used cooking oil is not hazardous waste, and we would like to correct that

You will find plumbing websites telling you that used cooking oil is classified as hazardous waste. It is not.

Under the List of Waste, used cooking oil and fat from a household is EWC code 20 01 25, edible oil and fat, and it is a non hazardous entry. The code people confuse it with is 20 01 26 star, which is oil and fat other than edible, meaning mineral and engine oil. That one is hazardous. Cooking oil is not.

So the correct advice is the simple version. Let it cool, pour it into a container with a lid, and put it in your general waste. Some household recycling centres take it separately, which is worth a check on your council’s own site, but you are not committing an offence by binning it.

What matters is that it does not go down the sink. Not the classification.

What to try before you call

Check the trap first

On a bathroom basin, and on most kitchen sinks, the blockage is in the trap directly beneath, and it takes ten minutes with a bucket and a pair of gloves. Unscrew it, empty it, rinse it, refit it hand tight. Most bathroom basin blockages are exactly this and nothing more.

Hot water and washing up liquid

on a slow kitchen sink, repeatedly. Detergent emulsifies fat and hot water keeps it moving. It works on partial blockages and does nothing on a solid one. Hot from the tap, not boiling off the hob, because boiling water softens and deforms plastic waste pipe.

A plunger

, but block the overflow first with a wet cloth. Otherwise you are just pushing air out of the overflow slot and achieving nothing. This is the single most common reason plunging a basin appears not to work.

What not to do

do not pour boiling water down a plastic waste, and think hard before using chemical drain cleaner. If you do use it and it does not work, tell us when you ring, because whoever opens that trap needs to know what is sitting in it. The NHS lists drain cleaner among the household products that cause chemical burns.

A smell is usually not a blockage

This one saves people money regularly.

If a sink, shower or utility drain smells of drains but runs freely, the problem is almost always the trap, not an obstruction. A trap works by holding a plug of water that seals the pipe against sewer gas. If that water is gone, the seal is gone and the smell comes straight up.

Common causes: a rarely used sink, shower or utility waste where the water has simply evaporated (run the tap for thirty seconds and the smell goes); a bottle trap that has cracked or been left loose after somebody worked under it; a washing machine or dishwasher connected without a trap or with the hose pushed too far in; or siphonage, where another appliance discharging pulls the water out of a neighbouring trap. That last one points at a venting problem on the stack and is a real fault worth fixing.

Run the tap first. If the smell returns within a day or two on a waste you use normally, something is wrong and it is worth a look.

Flats, terraces and shared waste stacks

If you are in a flat or a converted house and the blockage is affecting more than one property, or if you have a ground floor waste backing up when somebody upstairs runs a bath, the problem is in the shared stack and not in your flat.

That has two consequences. It usually is not yours to pay for, and clearing your own trap will not fix it. We will tell you when that is what we are looking at rather than charging you to rod your own waste for the third time.

Outside gullies, soakaways and surface water

Different problem, same phone call.

Gullies outside kitchen windows silt up with the same fat that narrows the pipe indoors, plus leaves and grit. A gully that stands full after rain is either blocked at the trap or the run beyond it is silted.

Surface water is its own issue in older property. Driveways and patios laid over the years without drainage, downpipes discharging to soakaways that have long since silted up, and extensions built over runs that were never properly relaid. If your problem is that water sits on the ground rather than that a pipe is blocked, say so when you ring, because that is a survey and a design job rather than a drain clearance.

What we do

Trap clearance and rodding for the straightforward jobs. High pressure jetting where a run is coated rather than plugged, which is the right answer for a fatted kitchen waste because rodding punches a hole through fat and leaves the rest of it lining the pipe. And a CCTV survey, coded to the MSCC5 industry standard, where it has blocked before and we need to know whether the pipe itself is the problem.

If it turns out the run is shared with a neighbour or crosses your boundary, it very likely transferred to the sewerage undertaker in October 2011 and is theirs to maintain. We will tell you that before quoting rather than after.

Get it looked at

Call 01462 506 374 or send us the details. Across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire, with a genuine 24 hour emergency line.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my kitchen sink keep blocking?

Fat, oil and grease. It leaves the pan as a liquid and sets solid on the inside of a cold waste pipe, and it collects everything else that follows. In hard water areas it binds with scale and gets harder still. The fix is to let it set in a container and put it in the bin.

Should I pour boiling water down it?

Not down modern plastic waste pipes. Boiling water can soften and distort the pipe and the compression seals. Hot tap water is fine. If a sink is slow rather than blocked, hot water and a plunger will often shift it.

One sink is slow but the others are fine. What does that mean?

A local blockage, usually the trap or the branch behind that one appliance. If several fittings on the same floor slow down together, the problem is further along the shared waste run, and if it affects a ground floor gully too it is the drain outside.

What is that smell from the plughole?

Usually a dry or displaced trap letting drain air back into the room, or a build up of grease and food in the trap itself. A sink that is used every day should not smell. A rarely used shower or utility sink often does, and it is normally the trap drying out.

Do you use chemicals or jetting?

Mechanical clearance first, so rodding or a hand auger for a trap or branch, and high pressure jetting where the blockage is out in the drain run. Jetting also strips the residue off the pipe wall, which is why it lasts longer than a chemical.

What if it keeps coming back?

Then it is not a blockage, it is a defect. Repeated blockages in the same place usually mean a fall problem, a partial collapse, root ingress or a badly made joint. We put a camera down and show you what is actually there rather than clearing the same pipe every three months.

Areas we cover

We clear blocked sinks, basins and drains everywhere we work.

We work across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire from our base in Stevenage. If your village is not listed, ring 01462 506374 and we will tell you honestly whether we reach you.