If your drain is broken or blocked, then it’ll require a prompt repair. There may be things you can do to improve the immediate situation – such as moving objects away to prevent water damage, and placing down buckets and towels to prevent flooding. However, to correctly repair a broken or blocked drain, it’ll require the expertise and know-how of a drain specialist, who can ensure that your broken drains are repaired quickly and to a high standard. So what should you do if you have a broken drain?
Shut Off Or Limit The Water Supply
If you find a leak, a flood or a broken pipe; the first thing to do is shut off the water supply. If you know how, you should locate and turn off the stopcock and/or your inside stop tap to prevent more water coming in and flooding your home.
You should also look to prevent the amount of water you use to not exacerbate the situation. This may mean foregoing showers, limiting your tap water usage and rationing toilet breaks until the problem is resolved. To prevent water damaging parts of your home, you should look to place down towels and buckets where possible.
After shutting off and/or limiting the supply, you should then call a drainage expert who can assess and resolve your drainage problem. At Total Drainage Services, our specialists are available 24/7 for emergency callouts, meaning you can have your issue resolved even if it’s in the middle of the night.
Unclogging Blocked Drains
If your drain isn’t functioning properly, you might assume that your drainage system is broken at some point. However, blockages can sometimes cause leaking and overflowing, and the issue could be resolved through unblocking the drain.
There are a number of things that could be causing your blocked drain, and there are a number of common remedies that you could try to unblock your drain yourself. Commonly-suggested solutions include using hot water or a bicarbonate of soda and water solution to clear the blockage. However, these may not always work, and might not tackle the underlying issue with your drains.
No matter whether your blocked drain requires emergency work or it can wait until the next day, it’s recommended to have a drainage expert assess it and resolve the issue. They can not only fix the immediate issue, but prevent further blockages and broken drains in the future.
Drain Repair Through Resin Lining
If your drain problem comes from a broken or ruptured drain or pipe, then simply unblocking won’t be enough to resolve the issue. If a pipe in your home needs replacing, then a plumber or drainage expert can help with a repair, which will usually result in the broken pipe in question being replaced.
However, this is much more difficult for external pipes, especially if they’re buried underground, or you don’t know the exact location of your underground drainage system. If an underground pipe is burst and is leaking wastewater on your property, then the pipe will need repairing. A costly and time-consuming way of doing this is through excavating the pipe and fitting a new one in. However, due to the amount of work required to do this and the costs involved, this isn’t the preferred method to repair broken or ruptured drainage. Instead, patch lining is far cheaper and easier to carry out.
Patch lining, also known as resin lining, allows you to repair the pipe from the inside by patch-repairing the pipe through the use of a sleeve and a resin that hardens. It essentially creates a new watertight pipe inside the existing one, and eliminates the need to replace your broken section of piping with a new pipe altogether. Pipes that have resin lining also have very long lifetimes, as a correctly-installed patch lining is yet to fail due to natural wear and tear, and the passage of time.
