Surface water drainage silts up quietly. Grit off a driveway, leaf litter, moss off a roof and general muck fill a gully trap or a channel run until the first heavy rain puts water somewhere it should not be, which is usually across a yard, into a garage or up against a doorway. Every grate comes up, the silt comes out, and the outfall is proved before the grates go back.
A channel run is only as good as its worst section, so clearing the one grate with water standing on it usually buys a fortnight. Lifting the lot, clearing the whole channel and jetting the outfall means the run works next winter as well as next week.
The trap under a gully is meant to hold a plug of water and catch grit, which means it fills up. Vacuuming it out and jetting the outlet restores the fall to the chamber. A gully full of solid grit is not draining anything, it is just a hole with a grate on it.
Block paved driveways, rear alleys shared with the neighbours, commercial yards and loading areas all silt at their own rate, and they all flood the same way. Clearing them is straightforward, which is exactly why it is worth doing before it rains rather than during.
Sometimes a channel run silts up. Sometimes it was never laid with enough fall, or it discharges into a soakaway that has stopped working, and no amount of clearing will change that. If yours is the second sort, you will get told, along with what would actually fix it.
Usually the channel drain across it has silted up, or the gully it runs into is full, or the soakaway at the end has stopped taking water. The three look identical from the surface and want completely different work, so the first job is finding out which one you have got, and that is usually a lifted grate and ten minutes rather than a survey.
Once a year suits most domestic driveways, ideally in autumn before the leaves come down and the weather turns. Commercial yards and anywhere with a lot of grit or vehicle traffic want it more often. If yours has flooded once, treat that as the reminder to put it on a yearly footing.
We can clear and jet the run into it and vacuum out what has silted the chamber, and on a lot of jobs that restores it. A soakaway that has genuinely failed, because the ground around it is saturated or it has silted solid over decades, needs digging out and rebuilding rather than clearing, and a camera and a water test will tell us which it is.
Often, yes. A gully trap holds a water seal that stops drain smell coming back up, and when it silts up or dries out that seal fails. Clearing and re-charging the trap fixes most of them. If the smell persists after that, something further down the run wants looking at with a camera.
Yes, and it is worth putting on a schedule. Yard gullies and channel runs on commercial sites take far more grit than a domestic driveway, and a flooded loading bay costs a lot more per hour than a planned visit. We work outside trading hours where it suits the site.
Southampton and Romsey are home ground and the villages between and around them are a short run, so getting to a job is rarely the slow part. Emergency callouts run 24/7 across the whole patch.
Ring and we will tell you what it is likely to be before we set off.
Send a few details and we will come back with a price. If it is an emergency, ring instead and we will get to you quicker.