Stand in a back alley in Katesgrove or Newtown and you are standing on top of a piece of Victorian engineering that still serves every house in the row. Many of Reading’s terraced streets were drained with one long pipe running behind the properties, collecting from each kitchen and bathroom in turn before heading for the sewer. It is a neat design with one weakness: when that pipe blocks, the problem is nobody’s alone. The lowest house on the run takes the flood, while everyone upstream keeps adding to it without knowing anything is wrong.
TrueFlow provides high-pressure drain jetting throughout Reading from our base in Bracknell. Long, shared, hard-worked pipework is where jetting does its best work, and Reading’s older streets have more of it than almost anywhere else we cover.
Why long shared runs defeat spot-clearing
A terrace run picks up deposits along its entire length, not at a single point. Reading’s tap water, supplied by Thames Water, is hard, so limescale builds steadily inside older pipes, and every household on the run contributes its own share of fat, food residue and soap. Over the years the pipe narrows a little everywhere at once.
Rodding, from £80, remains the right tool for a straightforward obstruction near an access point. Its limitation is reach and coverage: rods act on the spot they arrive at and leave the metres either side untouched. Clear a shared run that way and you have treated one bad section of a pipe that is tired along its whole length, which is why the same terrace often calls a drain company back every few months.
Jetting works differently. From a single access chamber the hose can travel the whole rear run, however many houses it serves, dislodging scale and grease in every section it passes and flushing the debris away downstream. One visit deals with the length of the pipe rather than the site of the symptom, which is what breaks the cycle of repeat blockages on these streets.
Shared terrace drains and the 1937 cut-off
Before booking anyone, check who actually owns the pipe: where a drain laid before 1 October 1937 serves more than one property, the law has long treated the shared section as a public sewer, which around Reading means Thames Water. Our guide to blocked drain responsibility walks through how to tell which section is whose, and if you would rather have the problem dealt with today than logged in a queue, we are happy to attend either way.
Method, prices and guarantees
Jetting in Reading starts from £150 including VAT, using pressures up to 4000psi chosen for what each pipe can take, so a century-old clay run is treated with the respect it deserves. If a run has blocked repeatedly, a combined jetting and CCTV package from £220 cleans the pipe and then inspects it, revealing any root ingress or joint damage that jetting alone cannot cure. A standalone CCTV survey starts from £120, and emergency call-outs from £120, with a 60-minute response target for genuine emergencies.
You approve an exact figure before we start any work, every job carries our 6-month guarantee, and TrueFlow is fully insured. We answer the phone 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Book drain jetting in Reading
If a drain in the Victorian streets around the centre, or anywhere across the RG postcodes, keeps slowing, smelling or backing up, have the whole run cleaned rather than the latest blockage shifted. Call TrueFlow on 0808 175 7440 for an exact price before any work begins, or see our Reading plumbing page for everything else we do in town. More on the technique itself is on our drain jetting service page.