Blocked Drains Epping

Epping was orchard and nursery land until the 1886 railway opened it up. Interwar and post-war brick houses followed on its leafy streets, then a wave of unit towers went up around the station once the area was rezoned in the 2000s.

That mix means two very different drain problems sit side by side. The older brick houses, many near Rawson Street, still run on original clay drainage that's had a century of mature street trees working roots into every joint.

It's the single most common callout we get in the older pockets. A sink empties slower each week until it stops completely, and the camera finds root mass sitting in a decades-old clay line.

The newer builds around the station don't have that problem, but they bring their own. Shared stacks in strata blocks concentrate a lot of fixtures onto one line, so a single tenant's misuse can back up an entire floor.

There's a middle layer too. Houses from the 1960s to 1980s sit between the two extremes, generally on more modern PVC drainage but often still tied into an older section of clay pipe closer to the street.

That handover point, where new plastic meets a decades-old clay junction, is where we most often find a partial collapse rather than a simple blockage. It looks like a slow drain until the camera shows the pipe has actually failed structurally.

A CCTV drain inspection tells us which end of that mix we're looking at before we book in any blocked drain repair.

The unit towers near the station are recent, but recent doesn't mean trouble-free.

A shared sewer stack serving forty apartments blocks the same way a single house's does, just with more people affected and less patience for it to take long.

Grease is the usual trigger. A busy kitchen exhaust fan clears the smell but not the fat, and it still ends up down someone's sink.

Wipes and sanitary products cause the rest. They don't break down the way toilet paper does, and in a stack shared by dozens of bathrooms it only takes one unit doing the wrong thing to back up several floors below it.

It isn't only the towers, either. The older semi-detached pairs and villa blocks scattered through the established streets share drainage across two dwellings, so one household's blockage can just as easily surface next door, and sorting out whose fixture caused it is half the job before anything gets cleared.

We work with strata managers directly when that's who's calling, camera the shared line, and clear it with the same up-front quote whether it's one unit or the whole building.

Step one. You call, we quote on the spot, nothing owed if you don't go ahead.

Step two. Camera down the line before we touch a tool.

Step three. Jetting, cutting or relining, whichever the footage calls for.

Step four. Screen shows you a clear pipe before we pack the van.