Clearing Blocked Drains Around Perth

What is actually blocking it

Tree roots. The dominant cause in older Perth suburbs. Clay pipe, jointed every few hundred millimetres, laid decades ago, with a mature street tree or a fig in the back yard. Roots do not break into sound pipe for fun — they follow moisture and find the joint that is already weeping. Once a root mass is established, it catches paper and solids and the line blocks on a cycle.

Fat and food waste. Kitchen lines. Cooking fat goes down warm and sets on the pipe wall, narrowing the bore until it closes. Common in older houses where the kitchen waste runs a long way to the gully.

Sanitary items and wipes. Wipes labelled flushable are not. They do not break down and they snag on anything.

Silt and sand in stormwater. Perth's sandy soil gets into soakwells and stormwater lines readily, and a soakwell that has silted up will back water into the downpipes in the first heavy winter downpour.

Collapsed or bellied pipe. Not a blockage so much as a defect. The line sags, holds water, collects solids, and blocks repeatedly no matter how often it is cleared.

How we approach it

Clear it first, then find out why. An electric eel gets the line open and gets your house working. That is the immediate job and on a Friday night that is the whole job.

Then, if it is a repeat blockage, a CCTV camera survey. That shows the condition of the pipe, the location and depth of the problem, whether roots have entered and where, and whether the pipe has failed structurally. It also tells you whether the fault is on your side of the connection or in the Water Corporation main.

High-pressure water jetting is the tool for a line that is fouled along its length rather than plugged at a point — fat in a kitchen line, fine root hair, silt in stormwater. It cleans the pipe wall properly instead of punching a hole through the middle of the obstruction.

The one advantage of Perth ground

Where a drain does need excavating, sandy soil makes it far cheaper than it would be almost anywhere on the east coast. Most of the coastal plain is loose sand that digs easily and backfills cleanly. That does not make a dig trivial — depth, shoring, services and reinstatement all cost — but it does mean that an excavation and repair here is a shorter job than the same repair in clay.

It cuts both ways on stormwater. Sand drains freely, which is why Perth uses soakwells rather than piping stormwater to the street, and it is also why soakwells silt up.

Preventing the repeat

Cut the roots back and nothing has changed at the joint. The durable answers are relining the affected section with a cured-in-place liner, or excavating and replacing the run in PVC. Which one makes sense depends on the length, depth and condition, and the CCTV footage is what decides it.

For kitchen lines, the fix is behavioural as much as mechanical: fat in the bin, not the sink, and a strainer over the waste.

Where we work

Blocked drain work is arranged across the metro. There are dedicated pages for Belmont and Bibra Lake, and the service areas page lists the wider coverage. If the water backing up is clean rather than waste, you may be looking at a burst pipe or a fault our leak detection work would find instead.