Blocked Drains Narrabeen

This suburb sits on flat, sandy ground between an ocean beach and a large lagoon with a wide catchment behind it. That geography puts a lot of it close to a high water table, which is a different problem to the hill suburbs nearby.

Along Pittwater Road, Bunnings Narrabeen anchors a working retail strip of shops and trades, mixed in with older brick and fibro cottages set back from the road. Closer to the lagoon, low-rise units have filled in alongside long-held family homes as the suburb's housing has gradually turned over.

Groundwater on the lagoon flats sits close enough to the surface to force its way into a drain through a cracked joint or a gap in an old clay line. That's a different failure mode to a drain that's simply silted up.

Water pushes in from outside the pipe as much as debris backs up inside it.

Where a property sits nearer the beach, sand does its own version of the same job, washing into gullies and grates and building up in lines that weren't laid with that kind of ingress in mind.

Every job here opens with a CCTV drain inspection to separate groundwater intrusion, sand and plain debris, then the footage decides between blocked drain repair and drain cleaning.

On top of the groundwater story above, three other causes turn up regularly here.

All three trace back to a blocked stormwater or blocked drain repair job, with the camera ruling out guesswork before we start.

Every booking starts with someone picking up the phone, not a menu of options.

From there it comes down to what the camera finds. Water pushing in, sand build-up and ordinary debris each look different once the footage is rolling, and that's what settles whether we're cabling, jetting or relining a section.

Nothing gets touched until you've agreed the number, and the last look through the camera is yours, not just ours, before we leave.