A blocked drain rarely picks a convenient moment. It tends to show up on a Sunday evening, or the morning you have people coming over, or halfway through a busy service in a commercial kitchen. If you are in Bournemouth, Poole, Dorchester, Weymouth or anywhere else in Dorset and the water is not going anywhere, here is exactly what happens when you pick up the phone.

First, work out how bad it is

Not every slow drain is an emergency. Before you call, it helps to check two things.

Is it one fixture or several?

If only the kitchen sink is slow, the blockage is likely local to that waste pipe. If the toilet, bath and sink are all backing up, or water is rising in an outside gully or manhole, the problem is in the main run and it needs an engineer.

Is anything overflowing?

Sewage surfacing in a garden, a manhole brimming, or a toilet that fills and will not empty are all genuine emergencies. Stop using water in the property and call straight away. Every flush makes it worse.

What we do when we arrive

There is a set order to a proper clearance, and skipping steps is how blockages come back.

We find the drain run. Lifting the right manhole tells us immediately whether the blockage is upstream or downstream of that chamber. That narrows the search to a few metres of pipe rather than the whole system.

We clear it. Depending on the cause, that means rodding or high pressure jetting. Jetting cleans the pipe walls rather than just punching through, which matters when the cause is fat, silt or fine roots.

We find out why it happened. This is the part that gets skipped by the cheapest operators. A drain that blocks once might have caught wipes. A drain that blocks repeatedly usually has a defect: a cracked joint, a root, a sunken section holding water. A camera down the clean pipe answers it in minutes.

We check and clean up. We run water through, show you it is flowing, and leave the area as we found it.

How much does blocked drain clearance cost in Dorset?

Prices depend on access, the location of the blockage and what is causing it. What you should always get, from anyone, is a fixed price before work starts.

Be careful with quotes that sound very low over the phone. The common pattern is a small call-out charge followed by an open-ended hourly rate once the engineer is on site. We do not charge a call-out fee at all, and we quote a fixed price once we have looked at the problem. If you tell us to stop, you pay nothing.

When clearing is not enough

Sometimes the honest answer is that clearing the drain is a temporary fix. Signs that you are dealing with a structural problem rather than a one-off blockage include:

• The same drain blocking more than twice in a year
• Sinkholes or soft patches in a lawn or driveway above the drain line
• Rats appearing in the house or garden, which usually means a broken pipe underground
• Persistent smells even after a clearance

In those cases the fix is a repair. That does not have to mean digging up your garden. No-dig relining rebuilds the pipe from the inside using a resin liner, and it comes with a ten year guarantee on our work. You can read more about how we approach drain repairs and relining if you think that is where you are heading.

Things worth doing to stop it happening again

• Never pour cooking fat down a sink, even with hot water behind it
• Bin wipes, cotton buds and sanitary items rather than flushing them
• Fit a gully guard to stop leaves and grit washing into outside drains
• Keep an eye on trees planted near a known drain run
• If you run a kitchen, put jetting on a schedule rather than waiting for a shutdown

Who covers your postcode

We are a family-run team with engineers spread across the region rather than run from one depot, which usually means a quicker response when a drain has backed up. You can check the full list of towns and postcodes on our areas we cover page.

Blocked right now? Call Total Drainage on 0333 004 7002, day or night. Send a photo on WhatsApp if you would rather, and we will tell you what we think it is before anyone travels. No call-out fee, free fixed quotes, and 5% off for NHS, OAP and military customers.