Blocked Drains Allawah

Common signs

Allawah is a tight little suburb, and the warning signs of a blocked drain look a bit different depending on where you live. In the walk-up flats around the station, the first hint is often a neighbour's problem becoming yours: a ground-floor unit gurgling or backing up when an upstairs flat runs the washing machine, because everyone shares the same vertical stack. In the older brick and fibro houses, watch instead for a basin or shower that empties slower each week, a whiff of sewage drifting up from the back gully, or water pooling at a floor waste. When a toilet bubbles as the bath drains, or the bath fills when you flush, that is the line below telling you it is nearly full. Catch it early and you avoid the after-hours overflow.

Common causes

Two stories cover most of Allawah. In the strata blocks near Railway Parade, the shared stacks slowly scale up with soap, grease and the odd wipe that should never have gone down, so one careless flush a few floors up turns into a blockage that several units feel at once. In the older houses on the quieter streets, the trouble is almost always tree roots; the established street trees push fine roots into every hairline crack in the original clay sewer, then catch fat, hair and toilet paper until the flow chokes. Kitchen lines anywhere in the suburb cop their share of cooking grease that sets hard once it cools. A lot of these clay pipes have been in the ground sixty years or more, which is plenty of time for a root to find a way in.

How we clear them

The first thing down the pipe is usually a CCTV camera, because guessing wastes your money. The footage shows us whether we are looking at roots in a clay joint, grease coating a kitchen line, or scale building up inside a shared stack, and where along the run it sits. Roots and grease come out best with high-pressure water jetting, which scours the pipe wall clean rather than just punching a hole through; solid obstructions and stubborn unit-stack blockages often suit a mechanical electric eel. We send the camera back through afterwards so you can see the line running clear. The drainage crew handling your booking through Dial Up Plumbing will also flag any cracked or root-split pipe that is going to block again, walk you through the camera vision, and lay out the options, including no-dig relining, with a price against each.