0800 772 33 99 — we cover WV6 from our base in Castlecroft, Wolverhampton.

Two things, both from the same van: clearing a drain that has blocked, and putting a camera down one to find out why.

What we do in Tettenhall

Blocked drains — cleared with high-pressure jetting rather than rods. Drain unblocking

CCTV drain surveys — graded, MSCC-coded, site plan and full video, report back the same day by NADC-certified surveyors. CCTV drain surveys

No repairs, no excavation — so no reason to find work that isn’t there.

Why people here ask for a survey

Buying the property. A standard structural survey does not go underground. This one does, and the report is written so it can go straight to a solicitor or be used to renegotiate.

Building over or near a drain. Extensions, conservatories and garden rooms frequently sit over a shared lateral or a public sewer. Severn Trent will want the position, depth and condition of the pipe before agreeing a build-over.

All the reasons a CCTV survey gets commissioned

Why drains fail in Tettenhall

What is under the ground matters more than the age of the house. These are the conditions behind most of what we find here.

Big houses, long runs, old trees. Tettenhall is largely Victorian and Edwardian villas on generous plots, which means drainage that runs a long way from the house before it reaches anything anyone can lift a lid on. When a blockage happens, the cause is rarely near the manhole you can see.

Tettenhall Rock. The ridge the village sits on is sandstone – it even lends its name to the local rock formation. Free-draining ground makes soakaways viable, but it also means fine material washes out through an open joint over the years, leaving a void for the pipe to settle into.

Mature planting over interwar clay. The established gardens along the Rock, Wightwick and Compton put substantial root systems over pipework laid in the 1920s and 30s. Root ingress is the single commonest thing we find here. What that causes: short pipe lengths and a great many joints, and it is the joints rather than the pipe that move.

Which is why we would rather put a camera down the run than tell you what is probably wrong with it.

Who pays

Anything shared or past your boundary transferred to Severn Trent in 2011 – worth knowing on plots this size, where a good deal of pipe sits well away from the house.

Areas we cover

Aldersley, Claregate, Compton, Tettenhall Rock, Tettenhall Wood, Upper Green and Wightwick — WV6.

Pricing, and why we quote before we travel

Drainage across Tettenhall — Aldersley and Claregate and the streets around them — follows one pattern. WV6 is what that covers.

Nobody likes a price that appears after the work. We give you one on the phone for Tettenhall work, agreed before we set off.

The two things that move it are access and whether the run needs clearing before it can be surveyed. Both are things we would rather establish in the conversation than on your driveway.

Why it only floods when it rains

On Tettenhall property, and particularly around Aldersley, Claregate, Compton, this is the usual picture.

CCTV view inside a drain showing heavy orange and dark staining across the pipe wall

A drain that copes all week and backs up in a downpour is usually telling you about capacity rather than a blockage.

On combined systems, common across older Tettenhall property, roof and yard water shares the pipe with everything else. Lose part of the bore to silt, roots or a displaced joint and the run still copes with normal flow – until the rain arrives.

Our surveys record water levels at intervals for exactly this reason: a section holding water where it should be running is a finding, not a detail.

Before you build over a drain

We cover WV6, and this comes up often enough on Tettenhall property to be worth setting out properly. Aldersley and Claregate see it as much as anywhere.

Extensions and garden rooms in Tettenhall frequently sit over a shared lateral, and Severn Trent will want position, depth and condition before agreeing a build-over.

There is a second reason to survey first, and it is worth as much as the first: a dated, coded record of the pipe’s condition before your works began ends any later argument about whether the build damaged it.

Why roots keep finding the same drain

Around Aldersley, Claregate, Compton the housing is old enough for this to matter, and WV6 is where we see it most.

If roots have been cleared from a Tettenhall drain once and returned, nothing has gone wrong – that is simply what happens when the way in is still open.

Roots enter through an existing defect: an open or displaced joint, a crack, a break. Cutting them out removes the mass but leaves the opening, and the same tree is still looking for the same water.

The useful question is therefore not how to kill the roots but where they are getting in, at what distance along the run, and whether that length is even yours – which is a camera and a plan, not another clearing.

Getting to the drain

Aldersley and Claregate are a fair sample of Tettenhall drainage, and what follows is what we find across WV6.

Most of the variability in a drainage job is access rather than the drain itself.

Older Tettenhall housing tends to mean shared entries, rear yards without vehicle access, and chambers that have been built over or landscaped out of sight. None of it is a problem

it is simply the difference between a short visit and a longer one, and it is the

part we would rather discuss on the phone than discover on arrival.

What actually blocks a drain in Tettenhall

Around Aldersley, Claregate, Compton the housing is old enough for this to matter, and WV6 is where we see it most.

Almost everything we pull out of a domestic drain falls into a short list, and most of it should never have gone down there in the first place.

Wet wipes. The single commonest cause we attend. They do not break up the way paper does, and once one snags on a rough joint the rest build against it until the bore is gone.

Nappies and sanitary items. They are designed to swell. A drain that will pass one will block on the third.

Fat, oil and grease. Poured down warm, set solid cold. On a WV6 run with any flat section it catches everything that follows.

Roots. Not a housekeeping problem – a structural one. Roots get in through a joint that has already opened, and then behave like a net.

A pipe that is already damaged. If a run blocks repeatedly in the same place, the cause is usually the pipe rather than what went into it.

Common questions

How far from the house will you survey? As far as the system runs. On Tettenhall plots that is often the point – the defect is usually at the far end.