What causes blocked sinks in Fulham
Fulham is street after street of late-Victorian terraces, most with side-return extensions and a good number converted into flats. Loft conversions and rear extensions are widespread, and both routinely build over the original drain line.
A slow sink is a partly blocked sink. The restriction is already there, and every wash adds to it, so dealing with it early is far less disruptive than waiting for it to close completely.
Because the housing stock is so uniform, so are the faults: root ingress at clay joints under front gardens, grease and fat in kitchen runs, and rainwater from newly paved areas overloading gullies at the rear.
What happens when we attend in Fulham
We work along the waste run in order, so we find the real restriction rather than the first one.
- Isolate and clear the trap under the sink, protecting the unit below
- Clear the waste run to the point where it joins the stack or gully
- Where the run is shared with other fittings, check those as well
- Flush the line through with volume, not just enough to drain the bowl
- Advise on what caused the build-up so it can be avoided next time
Most properties allow access to the rear through the house or a side passage. Where an extension covers the drain, we survey first so any excavation is limited to the actual fault.
Signs it needs attention now
- Water rising in the bowl before it drains away
- A gurgle from the plughole after the water has gone
- A stale smell from the plughole, particularly in a kitchen
- Both sides of a double sink draining slowly
- Water appearing under the unit or at the trap
What we see most often in Fulham
- Clay laterals under front gardens affected by root ingress
- Original drain runs built over by side-return extensions
- Rear gullies overwhelmed where the garden has been fully paved
Fulham is overwhelmingly family houses, many recently extended, and much of our work follows building work that changed how the drainage runs. We also carry out pre-purchase surveys, which in this uniform Victorian stock tend to find the same handful of faults.
Equipment and what happens afterwards
For sink work we carry small-bore clearance equipment, hand tools for traps and waste fittings, and jetting for the section beyond where hand tools reach. We also carry replacement trap seals and connectors, because a trap that has been disturbed several times over the years often needs replacing rather than refitting.
After clearing we fill and drain the bowl fully rather than running a trickle, which is the only reliable way to see whether the restriction has really gone. We check underneath for leaks at the joints we disturbed, and we tell you what the build-up was made of, because that usually points to a simple change in habit that prevents the next one.
What blocked sinks cost in Fulham
Clearing a blocked sink is a fixed £120 plus VAT, with no call-out charge. There is no call-out charge in Fulham, at any hour, and the price you are given on the call is the price you pay.
Areas we cover around Fulham
We cover SW6 and the surrounding streets of Hammersmith and Fulham, with engineers typically 60 to 90 minutes from the door. We work across Hammersmith, Chelsea, Putney and Battersea as well, so if the fault turns out to sit on a run shared with a neighbouring property we can deal with both ends of it.