0800 772 33 99 — we are based in Castlecroft, so for most of Wolverhampton we are minutes away rather than hours.

Across the city it is the same handful of things: gullies overflowing onto drives in the terraced streets, manholes surcharging in the interwar suburbs, and toilets that will not clear. Most of it is dealt with on the first visit.

Ring us and we will tell you straight away when we can get to you. You speak to the people who will do the work, not a call centre.

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How we clear it

High-pressure water jetting rather than rods. Rods clear a hole through a blockage and stop at the first bend; jetting travels the full run, goes round bends, and cuts material off the pipe wall so the drain is back to its true diameter.

How high-pressure drain jetting works

If it keeps happening, jetting is only half the answer

A drain that blocks repeatedly is telling you something structural is wrong. Roots are getting in somewhere. A joint has dropped and is catching solids. A section has broken and is collecting debris every time it rains.

Clearing it again treats the symptom. We can put a camera down the same run while we are there and find the cause — see CCTV drain surveys in Wolverhampton.

A survey we carried out at a property in Penn (WV4) logged fifteen defects across eight runs, including three separate points of root ingress and three displaced joints. Any one of those would have kept producing blockages indefinitely.

Why drains fail in Wolverhampton

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

Victorian clay, and a lot of joints. The terraces across Whitmore Reans, Dunstall, All Saints and Penn Fields run on salt-glazed vitrified clay laid in short lengths. Every joint is a place a root can enter and a solid can catch.

Ground movement in the east and south. Shallow historic coal workings under Bilston, Bradley and Ettingshall pull pipe joints apart. Displaced joints are the commonest structural defect we log across the city.

Pitch fibre on the post-war estates. Bushbury, Low Hill, Wednesfield and parts of Bilston were built with a bitumen-based pipe that is now well past its design life. It deforms rather than cracks, so the bore closes gradually and blockages become steadily more frequent. Jetting a deformed pitch fibre run needs a careful hand — it can be made worse. What that causes: it deforms along its length instead of failing at a point, which is why the problem creeps up over years and why patching one spot rarely helps.

Mature trees. The interwar suburbs — Penn, Tettenhall, Finchfield, Merry Hill — have large established trees over Victorian and 1930s clay. That combination produces most of the root blockages we attend.

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

Who pays

Since the 2011 private sewer transfer, anything shared or beyond your boundary belongs to Severn Trent, not you. If that is where the blockage turns out to be, we will say so rather than invoice you for it.

A local quirk: South Staffs Water supplies Wolverhampton’s water but does not handle sewerage. For drainage, Severn Trent is the right number.

Areas we cover

Across the city and its suburbs: Bilston, Bushbury, Castlecroft, Claregate, Compton, Dunstall, Ettingshall, Fallings Park, Finchfield, Fordhouses, Heath Town, Low Hill, Merry Hill, Oxley, Palmers Cross, Parkfields, Penn, Penn Fields, Tettenhall, Wednesfield, Whitmore Reans and Wightwick — WV1 to WV6, WV10, WV11 and WV14.

Drainage for business premises

Bilston and the rest of Wolverhampton share the same drainage story, so it is worth telling once. WV1, WV10 and WV11 are the ground being described.

The commercial version of a blocked drain is rarely just a blocked drain – it is a closed kitchen or a yard that cannot be used.

Grease, silt and volume are the three differences from domestic work, and all three respond better to a scheduled jetting and survey than to being left until they stop the site. We work on Wolverhampton commercial premises on both bases.

Why it only floods when it rains

On Wolverhampton property, and particularly around Across the city, its suburbs: Bilston, Bushbury, this is the usual picture.

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 Wolverhampton 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.

The report, and what is in it

We cover WV1, WV10 and WV11, and this comes up often enough on Wolverhampton property to be worth setting out properly. Across the city and its suburbs: Bilston see it as much as anywhere.

Written to be handed to somebody else – a solicitor, an insurer, a water authority – rather than just read once.

Each section carries a DRB grade and each observation a position in metres and a still image. Our reporting software is WRc-approved and MSCC-compliant, which matters when the report has to satisfy a third party rather than only you.

What it does not contain is a recommendations section quoting for work. We do not carry out repairs, relining or excavation, so we have nothing to sell on the back of what the camera finds. The report sets out what is there and how bad it is; what to do about it is for you and whoever does the work.

Buying a house in Wolverhampton

Wolverhampton covers a fair spread of housing, from Across the city, its suburbs: Bilston, Bushbury, and this applies to most of it.

A standard homebuyer’s or building survey does not go underground. Your surveyor will lift an accessible cover and comment on what is visible from the surface. Nobody puts a camera down the pipe unless you ask.

That is the gap. Drainage is invisible from the surface, expensive to put right if it is structural, and not something you can renegotiate after completion.

On Wolverhampton property the specific questions worth answering before exchange are what the pipe is made of, whether the runs are shared with neighbours, and whether anything has been built over them. All three are routine on a survey and all three cost money to discover afterwards.

A drainage site plan showing foul and storm runs, manholes, soil vent pipes and a backdrop, with distances marked between them — A site plan from a Wolverhampton survey. For most properties this drawing has never existed before.

Common questions

How quickly can you get here? Ring us and we will give you a realistic time before you commit to anything. We are based in Castlecroft, so getting across most of Wolverhampton takes under twenty minutes — the variable is what is already booked in, not how far we have to travel.

What will it cost? We will give you a price on the phone before we come out, so there are no surprises when we arrive.

Can you get to a drain in a back garden? Yes — our hose reels reach well beyond where the van can park.