The whole house at once
In April 2025 a property maintenance company sent us to a Morley home for jetting and camera work. The house had a whole-house blockage. When every fixture backs up together, the problem is almost always on the main sewer line rather than under any one sink or toilet, so that’s where we went looking.
In through the inspection shaft
Many Perth homes have a sewer inspection shaft: a vertical pipe from ground level down to the main line, with a cap on top. It is the easiest way to get equipment into the sewer without touching anything inside the house.
Our tech jetted downstream from the shaft and cleared the blockage. Water was flowing again. On plenty of jobs that would be the end of it, but we follow jetting with a camera, because a line that is flowing isn’t the same as a line that is clear.
Something that shouldn’t be there
This time the camera found a wooden picket lodged at the bottom of the inspection shaft. A long, flat length of timber, crusted in waste.
Jetting can push paper and waste past an obstruction like that, but it can’t move the obstruction itself. A picket across the bottom of the shaft keeps catching whatever comes down the line, and the build-up starts again. Left there, it would cause the next blockage, and the one after that.
Getting it out properly
A picket wedged at the bottom of a shaft is out of reach from the top. Our tech’s note was that it would need a robotic grabber, a tool that goes down the line under camera so the object can be gripped and lifted out. We quoted that as a separate job.
There was one more task on the day. A new inspection shaft cap and couplings had been left at the front gate for us, and our tech fitted them so the shaft was capped again before we packed up.
Worth knowing about your own shaft
- Find it before you need it. Knowing where your inspection shaft is saves time when a blockage hits.
- Keep the cap on and intact. An open or broken shaft lets soil, leaves and much bigger things into your sewer.
- Ask for the camera after jetting. Here the jetting fixed the symptom. Only the footage showed the picket that would have blocked the line again.
We clear blocked sewer drains across Perth, and a CCTV drain inspection after clearing lets you see what was actually causing it. If your Morley home has more than one drain backing up, call 0499 281 430.
More on blocked drains in Morley, or see more recent jobs.
