Drain Advice & Guides

Straight answers from Danny Ozoum, owner and drainage engineer: who pays when a drain blocks, where Southern Water's responsibility starts, what clearance costs, and how to keep the same blockage from coming back. Written plainly, with nothing to sell you.

Every guide here comes out of work Danny has actually done across Brighton, East Sussex and West Sussex. Where the honest answer is "it depends", it says so instead of guessing.

If a drain is blocked right now

Start with the drain you can see. Most of our call-outs are an outside drain or gully that has stopped taking water: silt, leaves and grease inland, sand and shingle packed into the pot nearer the coast. That guide covers how to tell what you are actually looking at before you touch anything.

If you have already had a go with rods and they will not come back out, do not pull harder. There is a way to free them and a way to make it considerably worse, and the difference is covered in rods stuck in a drain.

Before you buy anything at all, it is worth reading the mistakes that turn a small blockage into an expensive one. Caustic drain cleaner is the one Danny would steer you away from more than anything else: it usually pools on top of the blockage without reaching it, and then the drain has to be opened by someone with a face full of caustic liquid waiting for them.

Who actually pays for it

This is the question people get wrong most often, and it costs them money. Broadly: the pipes inside your boundary that serve only your home are yours. The shared runs and lateral drains past your boundary passed to the water company in 2011, which across most of Sussex means Southern Water. Which side of that line your blockage sits on is rarely obvious from the plughole. Who is responsible for a blocked drain? goes through it properly, including what to do once you know.

Once you know whose it is, what a blocked drain costs sets out honest UK ranges and what genuinely moves the price: access, depth, and what it takes to shift the blockage. Yours is agreed on the phone before anyone sets off, and there is no call-out fee.

Before either of those, it helps to know which half of the system you are dealing with, because it changes the method, the price and sometimes whose bill it is. Internal versus external drain clearance has a five-minute test with the taps that tells you whether the blockage is under a single plughole or somewhere out in the buried run.

Whether to do it yourself

Some blockages really do clear with a plunger and a bit of patience. Others will not, and the hours spent trying tend to make the eventual job harder rather than easier. Doing it yourself versus calling a professional is an honest comparison, including the cases where the answer is to save your money and keep going.

If you are not sure which kind you have got, the signs that a drain needs professional clearance sets out what to look for. Waste backing up in more than one fixture at once is the signal worth acting on quickly, because it usually means the problem is in the shared run rather than under a single sink.

Stopping it happening again

A drain that has blocked once will generally block again unless something changes. Outside drain maintenance is a season-by-season routine that takes a few minutes and prevents most repeat call-outs. The autumn leaf-fall one matters more inland than people expect.

If the smell is the problem rather than the flow, why drains smell explains dry traps and the other everyday causes, several of which are not blockages at all and do not need anybody called out.

Where we work

We clear blocked drains right across the two counties, 24 hours a day. The main blocked drain clearance page explains the service and the methods, and every town we cover has a page of its own: East Sussex and Brighton, or West Sussex.

Whatever the guides say, if you would rather just describe it to someone, call Danny on 07404 434534 at any hour.