Blocked Drains near you

Before the transfer, a householder could be liable for a shared Victorian drain running half the length of the street. Since 1 October 2011 in England and Wales, the pipes that serve more than one property, and the lengths that run beyond a single property's boundary to the public sewer, belong to the water and sewerage company, which maintains and repairs them out of sewerage charges. What stayed private is the drain that serves only your property and lies within your boundary.

Scotland never had that transfer and does not need it, because the line is drawn by curtilage instead. Scottish Water's guidance is that from the point a drain leaves the curtilage of your property, or joins up with drains coming from within the separate curtilage of another property, it becomes a public sewer. There is a catch worth knowing if you live in a tenement or a block of flats: where one curtilage contains several properties, the common drainage within that curtilage remains private, and the owners deal with it between them.

Northern Ireland follows its own route again. NI Water treats a blockage as the property owner's where only one property is affected and it has independent drainage with no flooding in the area, and attends where the problem lies outside your boundary or where several properties or sewer flooding are involved. It publishes response times for its own work: sewers reported before 2pm unblocked within eight hours, reports after 2pm cleared by noon the next day, and a four-hour response where a home has been flooded, followed by cleaning and disinfection.

Stop adding to it. Every flush, every basin and every washing machine cycle goes into the same blocked pipe, so tell the household to stop using water until someone has looked at it. Keep people and pets away from the contaminated area, open windows, and do not try to force the blockage with drain chemicals if waste water is already standing in the house, because splashing caustic product about is a second problem on top of the first.

Then report it before you buy anything. If the blockage is on the public sewer, a lateral drain or a shared run, your water and sewerage company will attend and clear it. Scottish Water's position on flooding is that where a property has been flooded by waste water from its sewers it will carry out a clean-up, removing excess liquid and sewage debris, leaving the area to dry and applying disinfectant, and that if a blockage in a public sewer caused the flooding it will clear the blockage. It is equally clear that compensation is a separate matter, paid only where the company is found to have been liable, and that it advises customers to contact their insurer first.

Photograph everything before any clean-up begins, and note the time you reported it and the reference you were given. If the work turns out to be on your own drain, that record is what your insurer and your contractor will both ask for.

A competent visit starts with covers, not equipment. The engineer lifts the inspection chambers in sequence from the house towards the boundary: a chamber standing full with the next one downstream running clear puts the blockage between the two, and a chamber full at the boundary points past it, which is the water company's territory rather than yours. That five-minute exercise decides who is paying for the rest of the day.

Clearing is then either rodding or high-pressure water jetting, depending on what is in the way and how far along the run it sits. Approved Document H, the statutory guidance for England, sets out the access points the system should have for exactly this purpose — rodding eyes, access fittings, inspection chambers with working space at ground level, and manholes deep enough to work in at drain level — sited at or near the head of each run, at bends, at changes of gradient and at junctions that cannot be cleared from elsewhere. If your drains have none of these, that is itself worth raising.

Where the same run blocks repeatedly, ask for a CCTV survey rather than another clearance. A camera run tells you whether you are dealing with a fat deposit, root ingress at a joint, a displaced pipe or a collapse, and those four findings lead to four different jobs. LokalMatch is how you get the quotations: describe the problem once — which appliances are affected, what you have seen in the chambers, your postcode — and drainage firms covering your area get in touch with you. The pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not clear the drain, does not set the price, and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses that reply, so confirming who owns the blocked length before work starts is still yours to do.

Report it first, in almost every case. Reporting costs nothing, and if the blockage turns out to be on the public sewer, a lateral drain or a shared run, the company clears it as part of the service you already pay for through sewerage charges. Companies will usually investigate to establish where the blockage is before deciding, and Severn Trent describes doing exactly that: if it is on their pipes they fix it, and if it is on yours it is the homeowner's to sort out.

Where the answer comes back that the blockage is inside your boundary, you are free to use anyone. Some companies offer to clear a private blockage there and then as a chargeable service, and they are explicit that you are under no obligation to accept and can arrange your own drain clearance instead. Getting a second quotation is reasonable and expected, particularly if the recommendation has jumped from clearing a blockage to excavating a garden.

The exception is a genuine emergency with sewage inside the house. There, ring the company, and if the answer is that the fault is private, take the first competent drainage firm that can attend rather than spending the evening comparing quotations while the problem gets worse.