M1 · M4 · M14 · M19 · M21 · 6 miles from base
Blocked Drains in Manchester
Blocked drains, CCTV surveys and no-dig repairs across Manchester — the centre, the inner terraces and the suburbs around them. A good deal of city drainage now has to run uphill before it runs anywhere, and that changes what a blockage actually is.
Same day in most cases. The centre is about twenty minutes from base; further out you get a realistic time before you commit to anything.
Local knowledge
Drainage in Manchester
The thing that makes the city different from the towns around it is that a lot of its drainage sits below the sewer it has to reach. Basement and lower-ground flats, warehouse and mill conversions, and a lot of modern apartment blocks with parking underneath cannot fall to the main by gravity, so the waste is collected in a chamber and pumped up to it. That works quietly for years and then does not.
When a pumped system fails it looks nothing like a blockage, which is why it gets misdiagnosed so often. Everything backs up at once across several flats rather than in one property; rodding achieves nothing; jetting achieves nothing, because there is no blockage in there to remove. What has actually happened is a failed float switch, a burnt-out pump, a macerator that has met wet wipes, or a rising main that has furred up with fat and rag. It is a different job with a different answer, and knowing that before somebody spends a morning jetting a perfectly clear pipe is most of the value.
The second thing worth knowing applies to the inner suburbs rather than the centre, and it catches people out constantly: the house and the drain underneath it are frequently eighty years apart in age. The clearance programmes of the sixties and seventies rebuilt above ground across a great deal of inner Manchester and connected the new housing into the Victorian runs that were already there. So a property that is plainly modern can be sitting on clay pipe laid in the 1890s. "The house is new, so the drains must be fine" is the assumption that costs the most money in this city.
What we do in Manchester
If the same drain in your Manchester property blocks two or three times a year, jetting is not the answer — the pipe itself is damaged. A camera survey will tell you which, and lining repairs it without digging.
Manchester — common questions
Every flat in the block has backed up at once. What causes that?
When a whole block goes at the same moment the fault is almost never inside any one flat — it is downstream of all of them, and in a converted mill or a modern block with parking below it that usually means the pump station. Anything below the level of the main sewer has to be pumped up to it, and when the pump, the float switch or the rising main fails, everything above stops draining together. It is worth establishing that before anyone starts rodding individual flats, because there is frequently nothing at all wrong with the pipework.
It has been jetted and nothing changed. What now?
On a property with a pumped system, no improvement after jetting is the strongest hint you will get that there was never a blockage. Jetting removes obstructions; it cannot restart a pump, replace a stuck float or clear a silted rising main. The next step is to open the chamber and watch what the pump actually does when the level rises, which takes minutes and answers it outright. Elsewhere in the city the same symptom more often means a defect in the run rather than a blockage in it, and that is a camera job.
The house was built in the seventies. Surely the drains are modern?
Very often not, and this is the local point worth taking away. Large parts of inner Manchester were cleared and rebuilt in the sixties and seventies, but the rebuilding happened above ground — the new housing was connected into the Victorian drainage that was already in the street. A 1970s house on 1890s clay is common here. It matters because the age of the pipe is what determines whether you are looking at open joints, root ingress and dropped sections, and the age of the house tells you nothing about it either way.
Do you cover all of Manchester or only the south?
All of it, and all of Greater Manchester — but the honest part of that answer is that a job in the city centre and a job on the far side of the conurbation are not the same promise. From base in Stockport the centre and the southern suburbs are routinely same day. Further out it depends on the day and the traffic, and you will be given a realistic time on the phone before you commit to anything rather than an optimistic one afterwards.
Wondering whose drain it is, or what it costs? Both are answered here.
Blocked drain in Manchester?
We cover M1, M4, M14, M19, M21 and the streets around them — 6 miles from base.