A commercial drainage maintenance contract is a standing agreement to clean, inspect and document a site’s drainage at fixed intervals, for a figure fixed in advance, with emergency attendance written into the same agreement. TrueFlow offers these contracts to businesses across Berkshire and the nearby Surrey and Hampshire towns, from a single restaurant to a managed office portfolio. One-off work for businesses sits on the commercial drainage page.
What the contract covers
A contract is assembled from five parts; the agreement lists only the ones your site needs.
- Scheduled jetting. High-pressure jetting, from £150 including VAT at up to 4000psi, of the runs that carry the site’s load: kitchen lines, washroom stacks and their branches, and external gullies and channels. Each run has its own interval, so a hard-worked kitchen line is cleaned more often than a quiet stack.
- Grease trap servicing. Where there is a kitchen, the trap is emptied and cleaned at a frequency matched to how fast it fills, with a Waste Transfer Note for every collection; TrueFlow Ltd holds Upper Tier waste carrier registration CBDU538687. The regime and the law behind it are on our kitchen drainage page.
- An annual camera check. A CCTV survey, from £120 including VAT, of the main runs once a year, so that an opening joint or a deforming section is found while it is still a repair job. Jetting with a survey in the same visit is from £220.
- A report after every visit, with photographs. What was cleaned, what the camera showed, pictures of anything worth seeing, and the Waste Transfer Note for any waste removed. One format from visit to visit is what makes a gradual change in a single run visible.
- Reactive cover. Emergency attendance sits inside the agreement: the line is answered 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with a 60-minute response target and call-outs from £120 including VAT.
Every visit is fully insured and guaranteed for 6 months.
How the price is calculated
A contract price is arithmetic, not a band. Each line of the agreement is one of TrueFlow’s published rates, multiplied by the number of times that line is scheduled in a year; the rates are on the pricing page, and grease trap emptying is priced by trap size. Adding the lines gives the annual figure, or a per-visit one if preferred. Both are put in writing with the proposal and both include VAT; if the site changes during the term, the schedule and the figure are revised together.
The published rates are floors, not quotes: run length, pipe diameter, access, trading hours and site induction all shape the time on site, which is why the premises are surveyed, free of charge, before a figure is given. Market pricing for commercial jetting and contracts is covered in the commercial drainage cost guide.
Who a contract suits
Any business whose drainage failure costs more than the invoice:
- Restaurants, cafés and hotel kitchens, where fat, oil and grease make a blockage a question of timing and the trap schedule doubles as the FOG compliance record.
- Hotels and venues, whose washrooms, cellars and kitchens peak at the moment a failure is most public.
- Offices and facilities management teams, who already keep every other building service on a planned schedule; the FM case, including several sites under one agreement, is on our facilities management page.
- Block managers and letting agents, for whom communal stacks and shared runs are a service-charge line better budgeted than absorbed.
- Schools, care homes and other buildings with large washroom populations, where a washroom out of use affects a whole building.
Records for insurers, inspectors and landlords
Each visit report, with its Waste Transfer Notes, builds a dated history of deliberate cleaning and inspection. Commercial property policies commonly exclude damage caused by gradual deterioration or lack of maintenance, so a record of routine jetting and annual camera checks supports the case that a failure was sudden; the sudden-versus-gradual test is explained in our guide to insurance cover for drain repairs, written for home policies but applying the same test. Landlords’ leases commonly put repair and maintenance of the demise on the tenant, and a file of reports proves compliance at a lease event.
What a contract does not include
The scope is drainage cleaning, inspection and emergency response. Bulk removal of liquid waste by tanker, including the emptying of petrol or oil interceptors and oil separators, is outside the agreement and needs sourcing separately. Grease trap installation is not offered either: the contract services the trap a kitchen already has. Where a survey shows a defect that cleaning cannot address, the repair is quoted separately.
Drainage maintenance contract FAQs
How often should commercial drains be maintained?
A busy commercial kitchen line is commonly put on a quarterly cycle, a washroom stack serving several floors once or twice a year, external gullies once in autumn ahead of the wet months, and the main runs a camera check once a year. Those are starting points for a typical site rather than fixed terms; the load on each run sets its own interval.
What are the early signs a site needs a contract?
The same run blocking twice within a year is the clearest sign. Others are washrooms that drain slowly at peak times and recover overnight, a smell that returns to the same spot after each clearance, standing water on a forecourt after rain, a grease trap that is full before its emptying is due, and emergency invoices that would have paid for the planned visits several times over.
Do insurers or landlords ask for maintenance records?
Increasingly, yes. Dated jetting and CCTV reports are the direct answer to an insurer’s maintenance question, and the same file is what a landlord’s surveyor asks for at renewal, dilapidations or sale. For a food business, environmental health officers can also ask to see the grease waste paperwork.
Can a contract start mid-lease or mid-year?
Yes. A contract is quoted for the site as it stands, so it can begin at any point in a lease or a financial year. The start date and the term are agreed alongside the schedule, so a tenant with eighteen months left on a lease, or a budget year that began in April, can set the dates that matter. If a run needs clearing before the schedule can begin, that clearance is priced and agreed first.
Does the contract price change if a run needs more visits than planned?
Only by agreement, and in both directions. The price is a schedule, each line a rate multiplied by its planned visits, so when a call-out between visits or a report shows that a run needs a shorter interval, the schedule is changed at the next visit and the annual figure moves with it. A run that stays clean can have its interval stretched the same way, and a change to the site itself, such as a new kitchen, means the schedule is re-priced as a whole.
Request a contract proposal
Call TrueFlow on 0808 175 7440 with the site’s postcode and what it contains, or request a callback, and an engineer will survey the premises when the site is quiet. The proposal lists each run, its interval and its rate, and the annual figure they add up to, so it can be compared line by line with any other quote.