Why a price quoted over the phone deserves suspicion
When someone gives you a firm figure without having seen anything, one of two things is true: either the figure covers only the easiest case and the rest arrives as an extra, or it is padded to be safe. Either way you pay the difference.
The honest approach is to explain what drives the price, give an order of magnitude and fix it on arrival. That is what we do, and it is what you can ask of anyone quoting you.
What moves the bill most: where the blockage is
A blockage in a kitchen sink trap is sorted in minutes. The same symptom, when the blockage sits in the building's shared stack thirty metres away, is a different job, a different machine and often a different person paying, because it belongs to the community.
So the useful first question is not what it costs but how far the problem reaches. If the basin and the shower are slow as well as the sink, the blockage is no longer in your kitchen.
Access and the machine it takes
Working from an accessible chamber in a garden is not the same as working from a bathroom on the fourth floor with no lift. Setting up and packing down counts, and the machine that fits through a door is not the one that clears a main run.
Cases that need a tanker truck or a high-pressure jetter are on another scale, and that is known before starting, not halfway through.
When the camera saves money instead of adding to the bill
A camera inspection looks like an extra until it stops three metres of floor being broken up in the wrong place. It makes sense when the blockage returns every few months, when roots are suspected, or when someone proposes breaking in.
It makes no sense for a sink that has blocked once in five years. We tell you which case you are in.
Out of hours, and what should not be on the invoice
A night or Sunday call-out costs more, and that is fair as long as it is said beforehand. What is not fair is finding out at signing. Ask about the surcharge before you give the address.
A diagnosis that leads nowhere should not be billed either. If we open up, look, and it turns out the problem belongs to the community, we tell you with a report for the administrator rather than charging you for work that is not yours.
