Collapsed Drain Repair Basingstoke | No Dig Fixed

Got a call from a landlord in South Ham about six weeks ago. Tenant had been complaining for months, slow draining bath, gurgling toilet, the odd smell drifting up from the garden. Previous contractor had jetted it twice. Charged twice. Fixed nothing.

I already had a pretty good idea what we were dealing with before I arrived.

What We Found

We ran a CCTV camera through the system within twenty minutes of arriving. The footage told the story immediately. About four metres out from the house, underneath a narrow strip of garden, there was a section of old clay pipe that had completely gone. Not a partial fracture. A collapse. The pipe had folded in on itself, probably over many years, until the bore was reduced to maybe a third of its original diameter. Silt, roots, and debris had packed into that restriction and it would keep blocking no matter how many times someone jetted it.

The clay looked original. South Ham has a lot of housing from the late sixties and early seventies, and plenty of it was laid with clay pipe and push-fit joints that simply do not last forever. The joints had separated slightly, roots from a nearby shrub had got in, and the surrounding ground had shifted enough to crack the pipe through.

The landlord's first question was the obvious one. "How much of my garden are you digging up?"

None of it, as it turned out.

What No-Dig Relining Actually Means

Patch lining and full structural relining gets talked about a lot in the trade. Not everyone does it properly. The method we used here was a cured-in-place patch liner, sized to the pipe diameter, inserted through the existing access point and positioned precisely over the collapse using the CCTV camera as a guide.

The liner is a resin-impregnated sleeve. Once it's positioned, it's inflated against the existing pipe wall and the resin cures hard. What you end up with is effectively a new pipe inside the old one. Smooth bore, no joints for roots to re-enter, structurally independent of the damaged host pipe around it.

From the landlord's point of view, we went in through the manhole, worked from inside the drain, and left the garden exactly as we found it.

Jetting a collapsed drain is like painting over damp. It clears the blockage today and you'll be back in six weeks doing it again.

The Result

Once the resin cured we ran the camera back through to confirm the liner had seated correctly and the bore was clean and clear end to end. Signed off with a post-lining survey report, which the landlord can keep for his records.

The tenant rang a week later to say everything was draining normally. No smell. No gurgling.

The work carries a 20-year guarantee. The two previous jetting visits combined had cost more than the CCTV survey alone, and they'd solved nothing because nobody had actually looked at what was causing the problem.

The Lesson

If a drain on your property has been jetted more than once for the same problem, somebody needs to put a camera in it. That's not a sales pitch, it's just logic. Repeat blockages in the same location mean there is a reason. Root intrusion, a cracked joint, a partial collapse, a belly in the pipe where waste is sitting and building up. Jetting clears the symptom. A CCTV survey finds the cause.

Older properties in South Ham, Hatch Warren, Brighton Hill, Kempshott, and across the RG22 and RG21 postcodes are particularly prone to this. The drainage infrastructure is fifty-plus years old in a lot of cases. Clay pipe and old-style mortar joints do not last indefinitely.

If you're seeing slow drains, repeat blockages, or wet patches in the garden with no obvious explanation, get it looked at properly before a contractor charges you twice for a fix that isn't one.

Drainsco covers Basingstoke and all the RG postcodes, engineers available 24 hours a day. No call-out fee, and you'll have a clear price before we start anything. Give us a ring.