Drains Telford [work]: Blocked

“Clay pipes are like a magnet for tree roots,” Dai said. “The joints shrink over time, leaving a tiny gap. A root finds that gap, follows the moisture and oxygen into the pipe, and then it branches out. You can jet them out, but they grow back. The real fix is a structural repair—either a patch liner or digging up the old pipe and replacing it with modern plastic.”

The most dramatic case, however, was at "The Ironbridge Spoon." The foul smell was accompanied by a worrying sign: water bubbling up from a manhole cover in the pub’s car park. This was a blocked main drain—shared by the pub and three neighbouring cottages. A collapse.

Dai’s team arrived with a “call out” marked urgent. Using a powerful vacuum truck (a "hydro-vac"), they sucked the standing sewage away. Then came the CCTV camera. Deep underground, in a section of pipe laid in the 1920s, a section of the brickwork had collapsed, creating a dam of rubble and sludge. blocked drains telford

“Fats, Oils, and Grease,” Dai explained. “When you pour bacon fat down the sink or rinse a pan with oil, it’s liquid when hot. But as soon as it hits the cold pipe under your kitchen, it solidifies. Over months, it builds up like concrete. It catches food scraps, coffee grounds, and eventually, you get this.”

Sarah’s problem was a classic modern issue. The gurgle became a complete standstill. Water sat in the sink, refusing to budge. She tried a plunger, then a bottle of thick, caustic gel from the supermarket. It cleared the water for a day, but the smell—a rotten, eggy odour—only grew worse. When she called a local Telford drainage company, the technician, a veteran named Dai, arrived with a camera on the end of a flexible rod. “Clay pipes are like a magnet for tree roots,” Dai said

Meanwhile, Bill’s slow-draining bath was a different mystery. The water didn’t just drain slowly; sometimes, it would back up into the shower tray an hour later. Dai’s camera went down the old clay pipe under Bill’s garden and found the culprit: a dense, dark web of thin, wiry roots.

The cure was high-pressure water jetting—a lance that blasted the pipe clean with water at over 3,000 PSI. Sarah learned a valuable lesson: the bin is for fats, not the sink. You can jet them out, but they grow back

For Bill, the thought of digging up his prize-winning rose garden was a tragedy. But Dai offered a solution: trenchless pipe relining. A resin-saturated liner was inserted into the old clay pipe, inflated, and cured into a new, smooth, joint-less pipe inside the old one. The roses were saved.