High Pressure Drain Jetting in Lewisham — Fat, Grease and Roots Cleared

A blocked drain does not clear because something dissolved. Fat congeals, scale builds on the pipe wall, silt settles in the bottom of the run and roots grow along the outside of the pipe into the gaps at the joints. High-pressure jetting puts a high velocity water jet through the line to break that material up, and a separate suction removes it. Removing the solids is the part that matters. Work that only loosens a blockage and pushes it further along the pipe buys a few weeks.

What High Pressure Jetting Actually Does

The engineer picks a nozzle for the pipe diameter and the job, feeds the hose from the vehicle, and works along the run from the nearest access point. Cutting nozzles break up hard material such as scale and compacted silt, general purpose nozzles flush loose debris, and root cutters shrink root ingress at the joints as they pass. The hose is fed and retrieved on the same winch, so the operator always knows how far the nozzle has travelled and which part of the run the blockage sits in.

Afterwards the line is run again to check that water is running clear to the boundary or the main, and that the run has not simply backed up into the next section. If it has, the run is mapped properly rather than guessed at.

Fat, Oil And Grease Are A Legal Duty, Not A Housekeeping Choice

In a borough with a dense restaurant and takeaway trade around Catford and the town centre, fat is the most common cause of a commercial blockage. It is also regulated. Under section 111 of the Water Industry Act 1991 it is a criminal offence to discharge fat, oil and grease into the sewer in quantities that cause blockages, and the Environmental Protection Act 1990 places a duty of care on commercial premises to keep what they discharge under control.

Where a kitchen has a separator, BS EN 1825-2 covers the equipment and it is usually sited outside the building, which means the last few metres of the drain run and the access to it are part of the same problem as the kitchen. Industry guidance is to empty the separator at about 25% capacity. A separator that is allowed to fill and then be emptied on a six-monthly cycle will not protect the run behind it, however well the kitchen behaves.

Roots In Brick-Lined Gardens

Lewisham's rear gardens are narrow and often sit directly over the drain, which is why root ingress shows up here so often. Roots do not bore through sound pipe. They find the joints, and they exploit a displaced joint or a crack where there is water and air to encourage them. The result is a drain that clears and then blocks again in the same place within a few months.

Jetting removes the roots and, more importantly, removes the scale and silt that gave them somewhere to grip, so the drain is clean when they come back. On a run that keeps failing, cleaning alone is a holding measure and a camera survey is the sensible next step. Our CCTV drain survey service shows the joint that is letting them in.

Getting The Equipment Onto The Street

Jetting is a vehicle job, so the parking conversation is part of the work rather than an afterthought. In Lewisham, applications to suspend a parking bay must be made at least five working days before the start date, and the council charges a £62 administration fee per application. A pay-to-park or shared-use bay costs £56 per bay per day, and a resident permit bay is a one-off £62. A suspension can run for up to six months; anything longer needs a temporary traffic order, which is a longer process and worth planning around. No suspensions are possible on Red Routes, and suspended spaces are marked with yellow warning boards on the street.

The controlled parking zones that affect most of SE13 and SE6 are Catford West and Hither Green West, Monday to Friday 9am to 7pm; Deptford, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm; Lee, Lee Green and Hither Green East, Monday to Friday 10am to noon; and Davids Road, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. Working inside those hours on a resident permit or pay-to-park bay is where neighbours get squeezed, so we agree the bay and the arrival time with you before the booking is confirmed.

Jetting On Lewisham's Interwar And Post-War Estates

A large part of the borough is interwar and post-war stock rather than Victorian, and it drains differently. The Bellingham Estate was built in 1923 with 2,700 homes, the Downham Estate between 1924 and 1930, and the Grove Park estate between 1926 and 1929, with planned street layouts at Catford and Hither Green being built out in the same period and terraces and semi-detached houses gradually replacing earlier villas. After the war the Passfields estate at Daneswood Avenue in Catford was built between 1949 and 1950 to designs by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew.

On these estates the shared runs are the recurring problem. A single blockage on a downpipe or a branch affects a row rather than one house, and the pipe work is often a mix of materials laid in different decades. Where the council's own 2024-25 housing stock condition survey found 24% of homes failing the decency standard, and committee papers name the aging housing stock, with many pipes corroding and leading to leaks, as a major challenge, corroded shared runs are the reason a single clear-out is not the end of it. Corrosion narrows the bore unevenly, and a partly blocked shared run will hold solids until the next freeze or downpour.

What It Costs And What You End Up With

High-pressure jetting in Lewisham typically costs between £150 and £350. The number is agreed in full before the engineer starts work, and there is no callout fee from the attending engineer on top. You get the run cleaned out rather than disturbed, the material removed, a check that the line is running clear afterwards, and advice on whether the pattern of blockage points to a structural fault that cleaning cannot fix.

Last Updated: 23 September 2026