Blocked Drain Myths Andover | What's Actually True

Half the calls we get across SP10 and SP11 start the same way. Someone has already tried something they read online, it hasn't worked, and now the problem is worse than it was on Monday morning. The advice itself is rarely malicious. It's just wrong, or right in one very narrow situation and repeated everywhere else.

Here are the three myths I hear most often, and what's actually going on.

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Myth 1: Bleach Clears a Blocked Drain

This one is everywhere. Pour bleach down, leave it overnight, job done. Landlords in Picket Twenty tell tenants this. Café owners on the high street swear by it.

Bleach is a disinfectant. It kills bacteria and cuts through grease films on the walls of a pipe. That's not nothing, but it's also not the same as clearing a blockage. If your drain is slow because of a light grease build-up, bleach might buy you a few weeks. But most blockages we attend aren't a grease film. They're a physical mass, congealed fat, wipes, root ingress, or a collapsed section of pipe. You could pour bleach down there every day and nothing would shift.

Worse, if you've got a partial blockage and you add bleach, you're potentially sitting water mixed with a caustic chemical. That makes the eventual clear-out more unpleasant for everyone, and if there's already any crack or joint separation in the pipe, you're adding chemical stress on top of it.

What actually works: high-pressure water jetting. It physically breaks up and flushes the blockage, not past it, out of the system entirely. For recurring build-up, planned preventative jetting on a schedule is cheaper than repeated emergency call-outs.

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Myth 2: Flushable Wipes Are Fine for Drains

The packaging says flushable. The packaging is wrong.

I've pulled wipes out of manholes in Charlton, Foxcotte, Saxon Fields and pretty much every other part of Andover you can name. They don't break down in water the way toilet paper does. Toilet paper disintegrates within seconds under water pressure. Wipes hold their structure. They catch on the first rough edge they meet inside the pipe, then the next one latches on, then fat, then more wipes, and within a few weeks you've got a solid mass that no amount of bleach or plunging will touch.

The word "flushable" has a technical definition that relates to whether the wipe will pass through the toilet trap, not whether it will clear a residential drain or the shared sewer network. It's a legal minimum, not a real-world guarantee.

A small commercial kitchen in Andover town centre called us out last year. The drain from the prep area had backed up completely. The cause was baby wipes the cleaning staff were using and flushing. One CCTV survey and a jetting session later, the drain ran clear. We recommended a grease trap and a no-wipes policy. They've not called us since. That's a good outcome.

If you're a landlord with multiple tenancies, wipes are almost certainly a recurring cost you haven't tracked yet. It's worth building a clear-drain clause into tenancy agreements and scheduling an annual jet.

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Myth 3: A Plunger Will Always Sort It

A plunger is the right first move for a toilet blockage that's clearly close to the pan. Soft paper blockage, nearby, plunger works. That's the scenario it's designed for.

Beyond that, it's limited. A plunger creates pressure changes. That shifts soft material that's loosely sitting in the pipe. It does nothing to a compacted mass of fat and wipes three metres down the line. It won't touch root ingress. It can't clear a section of pipe that's collapsed or misaligned, which is more common than people expect on older properties across Andover Down and in villages like St Mary Bourne and Wherwell where Victorian-era clay drainage is still in service.

There's also a less-discussed risk. Aggressive plunging on a drain with a partial blockage further down can push water back through the trap seal of a secondary fitting, a basin or a bath. You shift the water, but you don't clear the blockage, and now you've got water coming up somewhere you didn't expect.

If plunging hasn't worked after two attempts, stop. The blockage isn't where you think it is, and more force won't help. A CCTV survey will show you exactly what you're dealing with, and then you can make a sensible decision about jetting, cutting, repair, or relining.

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Drainsco covers Andover and the surrounding SP postcodes, with engineers available 24 hours a day. There's no call-out fee, and we'll give you a clear price before we start any work. If you're not sure whether you've got a blockage or something more structural, give us a call and we'll talk it through.