Collapsed Drain Repair Solihull | No Dig, No Mess

A customer near Smith's Wood called us on a Tuesday morning. Slow draining, she said. Happened a few times before, always seemed to sort itself out. This time it hadn't.

I've heard that exact description probably three hundred times. Half the time it's a blockage, a straightforward jet and away you go. The other half, something worse has been sitting there quietly getting worse for years.

This one was the other half.

What We Found Before We Touched Anything

We started with a CCTV drain survey. Always do on a recurring problem. You can jet a blockage out of a collapsed pipe and feel like a hero for two weeks, then be back again, and again, and the customer loses trust in you and in the whole trade. Not good enough.

The camera told us everything inside about four minutes. A section of the run from the house to the shared lateral, roughly eight metres in, had gone. Properly gone. The pipe, an old clay one, had fractured along the crown and the soil above it had started pushing down into the bore. Classic partial collapse. The effective diameter of the pipe at that point was maybe a third of what it should have been. Every flush was trying to push water through a gap the size of a fist.

The garden above it was a neat, established lawn. Slabs either side, a couple of raised beds, one reasonably mature shrub. Digging it up was an option. It wasn't a good one.

Why We Went for Relining, Not Excavation

Drain relining, or cured-in-place lining if you want the technical term, lets you install a new pipe inside the old one without breaking the surface. You drag a resin-saturated liner through the damaged section, inflate it hard against the host pipe, and cure it. What you end up with is a smooth, continuous new bore bonded to the inside of the old clay. No joints. No ingress points for roots. No dig.

Here's how the options looked side by side for this job.

Jetting and clearing was never really on the table once we'd seen the camera footage. You don't patch a structural problem with water pressure.

The Job, Step by Step

First, we jetted the line clean. You can't reline a dirty pipe. High-pressure water jetting through the affected section, pulling out the debris and the root tendrils that had started finding their way in through the fracture. Then a second pass with the camera to confirm the bore was clear and to measure the collapse precisely.

The liner was cut to length, saturated with two-part epoxy resin, loaded into the inversion drum. We fed it in from the upstream manhole. Once it was seated and positioned across the full damaged section, we inflated it with compressed air and held pressure while the resin cured.

Cure time depends on the resin, the pipe diameter, and the ambient temperature. On a cool October morning in B36 it took a couple of hours. We didn't rush it.

Final CCTV pass once the liner was solid. Smooth bore, full diameter, no movement, no intrusion. Done.

The customer's garden looked exactly as it had when we arrived. That's the whole point.

The Lesson to Take From This

If your drain blocks more than once in a twelve-month period, a camera survey is not optional. It's the only way to know whether you're dealing with a blockage or a structural failure that's causing the blockage. They look identical from the kitchen sink.

Old clay pipe, common across the B36 and B37 areas and throughout older Smith's Wood, Chelmsley Wood and Castle Bromwich properties, doesn't last forever. Ground movement, tree root pressure, frost cycles, decades of settlement. It cracks. The garden above it gives no sign.

By the time you've called a drainage company twice for the same slow drain, you've probably already spent more than a survey costs. Book the survey first.

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Drainsco covers Solihull and all the B postcodes, engineers available 24/7. If you've got a recurring drain problem and want a camera on it before committing to anything, give us a call. No call-out fee, a clear price before we start anything.