Drain Cleaning & Leak Detection

Clearing a blockage is the easy half. The half that saves you the next call is finding out why it blocked — because a drain that backs up twice in a year is telling you something about the pipework, not about what went down it.

Inside an older house the recurring causes are a short list: a branch that was never vented properly, so it gulps and drains slowly ever after; a run with too little fall, or too much; a flexible waste pipe that has sagged into a permanent low spot and collects everything that passes; or a bore that was always slightly undersized and has been narrowing with grease and soap for twenty years. All of those have real fixes. Pouring something caustic down them monthly does not.

A leak shows itself a long way from where it actually is. Water runs along a joist and comes through a ceiling two rooms away, so the stain on the plaster is evidence, not an address.

The point of finding it properly is that it decides how much has to come apart. Locating a pinhole precisely is the difference between one neat access hole and a wall.

A surprising share of the "smell in the kitchen" calls we get are a trap that was never installed right — the wrong arrangement, too much fall, or a flexible pipe fitted where rigid should have been. It drains, so nobody questions it, and the water seal that is supposed to keep drain odours out of the room quietly is not doing it.

It is a small job with a large effect, and it is one of the things worth looking at while we are under there anyway.

We clear the drains inside the house: sinks, tubs, showers, toilets and the branch pipes they run into. That is the great majority of drain calls and it is the work we are set up to do properly.

We do not work on the buried main sewer line running from the house out to the street. No clearing it, no camera inspection, no jetting. That is a different trade with different equipment, and a company that does it every day will do it better and cheaper than we could.

The useful test is how many fixtures are affected. One slow sink, one tub that gurgles, one toilet that will not clear — that is a branch problem, and it is ours. Everything letting go at once, or a basement floor drain backing up when the washing machine empties, usually means the trouble is out in the main line rather than inside the house. If that is what we find, we will say so and stop rather than sell you an hour of poking at it.

The leaks that do real damage are the ones that run for days while a house is empty. FLO by Moen is a device fitted to the main that watches flow and shuts the water off when it sees a pattern that should not be happening.

De Rosa Bros install it. It is a good answer for a house that gets left over winter or a family that travels, and an unnecessary expense for plenty of other households — we will tell you which you are.