Quick answer: Stop and ring someone when the problem stops belonging to one fitting. Two sinks backing up together, water standing in the outside gully or manhole, the same blockage returning within a fortnight, a bath gurgling while you flush the toilet, or waste coming up somewhere it has no business being. Any of those means the obstruction is in the shared run underground, not in the bit you can reach with a plunger. You will not fix it from the plughole. For 24/7 clearance in Brighton, Hove or anywhere across Sussex, call Danny on 07459 599505.
1. More than one fitting is backing up at once
This is the big one, and it is the fastest way to tell a small job from a real one.
One slow basin is a trap full of hair. Two or more fittings misbehaving together is different, because the only thing they have in common is the pipe they all eventually empty into. If the kitchen sink is slow and the downstairs toilet is sluggish and the shower has started pooling, the blockage sits downstream of all three, out under the path or the garden.
Nothing you pour down one plughole will reach it. You are treating the symptom at the wrong end of the system.
2. It clears, then comes straight back
A blockage you shift with a plunger and see again a week later was never shifted. It was punctured.
What usually happens: you force a channel through the middle of a fat and wipe build-up, water starts moving, everyone declares victory. The build-up is still lining the pipe. It closes the gap up again in a matter of days, sometimes faster if it's a kitchen run in winter when the fat firms up.
Clearing it properly means taking the deposit off the pipe wall, not making a hole in it. That is what jetting does and what a plunger cannot.
If you are on your third round with the same drain, you are not unlucky. You are on the wrong tool.
3. Water is standing in the outside gully or the manhole
Go outside and look. It costs you nothing and it tells you more than anything you can see from indoors.
Lift the manhole cover if you can get it up safely. If the chamber is full or the water is sitting well above the channel at the bottom, the blockage is further along the run than that chamber, heading out towards the sewer. If the gully outside the kitchen is brimming and slow to drop, same story.
That also matters for who pays. A blockage on your own private run is yours to sort. Once it is past your boundary in a shared or public sewer, it is usually Southern Water's, and they will come out for free. Worth reading who is responsible for a blocked drain before anyone gets a bill.
4. Something gurgles when you use something else
Flush the toilet and the bath makes a noise. Empty the washing machine and the kitchen sink burps at you.
Those two things are not connected in your head, but they are connected underground, and the gurgle is air being pushed through water that has nowhere to go. It is trapped air finding the nearest escape route, which happens to be through your bath trap.
This one is worth taking seriously early, because a gurgle is often the warning shot. The run is partly restricted but still passing water. Give it a few more weeks of fat and wipes and it will not be passing anything, and you will be ringing someone at eleven at night instead of on a Tuesday afternoon.
5. You have already tried, and it has not worked
There is no shame in this. Most people I go out to have had a go first and I would too.
But there is a point where carrying on costs more than stopping. Chemical drain cleaner tipped down a fully blocked pipe does not drain away. It sits there, in a pipe, waiting for whoever opens it next, and that is now a problem for both of us. Rods are worse for it: pushed hard into a bend by someone who cannot feel what they are hitting, they can come apart and leave a section down there, which turns a blockage into a blockage with a steel rod inside it. We have written that one up separately in drain unblocking mistakes and what to do if your rods are stuck.
Rough rule: if half an hour of honest effort has not moved it, it is not going to move.
Why this happens so much around here
Brighton and Hove have a lot of Victorian terraces sharing one drain run between several houses. That layout means a blockage in the shared section shows up in more than one property at once, and it also means no single household's plunging is ever going to fix it. The steep streets in Hanover and Kemptown do not help either, because a gravity run that is already working hard silts up quickly once anything narrows it.
Add student lets and holiday flats with a heavy turnover of tenants, none of whom know the drain's history, and you get kitchen runs carrying years of fat that nobody has ever properly cleared. Autumn is the other spike, when leaf fall chokes the gullies across the whole city inside a fortnight.
What does professional clearance actually involve?
We turn up, work out where the obstruction sits by testing which fittings are affected and checking the chambers, then clear it from the right access point. Sometimes it takes ten minutes with the right kit through the right cover. Sometimes it is a jetting job to strip out a run that has been narrowing for years.
Cost depends on the job, which is why the price comes over the phone once we know what we are dealing with rather than off a page. There is a breakdown of what moves the number in our guide to blocked drain costs.
If any of the five above sound like your week, book blocked drain clearance and we will get it moving. We cover Brighton, Hove, Worthing and the rest of Sussex, day or night.
Drain past the plunger stage? Get it cleared today. Call 07459 599505