What causes blocked sinks in Kensington
Kensington is dominated by tall stucco-fronted terraces and garden-square townhouses, many of them converted into flats or maisonettes. Deep basement extensions are widespread, which puts kitchens, utility rooms and wet rooms below the level of the main drain.
Bathroom sinks are a different story: hair, soap and toothpaste bind into a mass that sits in the trap or just beyond it, which is why the water level rises long before the sink stops draining altogether.
Below-ground pipework here is often original clay laid in the nineteenth century, with shared laterals running under front gardens and lightwells. Where a basement has been dug out, waste usually relies on a pumped system, so a blockage downstream shows itself first as an alarm or a backing-up shower tray.
What happens when we attend in Kensington
Clearing the visible part is easy; the useful part of the job is checking what is behind it.
- 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
Front lightwells and vaults make inspection chambers harder to reach than in a standard terrace. We come prepared for restricted access and we take the same care with tiled steps and stone thresholds as we would with any listed frontage.
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 Kensington
- Root ingress into original clay laterals under front gardens and garden squares
- Basement pump chambers filling because the discharge run is partly blocked
- Lightwell gullies overwhelmed by surface water during heavy rain
Most of our Kensington work is for owners of period houses and for the agents who manage converted flats within them. We also attend a steady number of newly excavated basements, where the drainage was installed recently but the run it discharges into was not.
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 Kensington
Clearing a blocked sink is a fixed £120 plus VAT, with no call-out charge. Evenings, weekends and bank holidays carry no call-out charge, so an urgent job in Kensington costs what we quote.
Areas we cover around Kensington
We cover W8, SW7, W11 and W14 and the surrounding streets of Kensington and Chelsea, with engineers typically 60 to 90 minutes from the door. We work across Chelsea, Hammersmith, Fulham and Westminster 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.