Blocked Drains St Ives

Large blocks, big gardens, and a housing stock that only really got going after 1959, when the land was rezoned out of its rural past. That's the story here, and it explains most of what turns up on our call sheet.

Post-war and mid-century brick homes dominate, spread across generous lots. Plenty back straight onto bushland reserve on the suburb's eastern edge, near Garigal National Park and the Dalrymple-Hay Nature Reserve's blue gum forest remnant.

Those big blocks are exactly why properties here tend to have more garden, and more mature trees, than a typical Sydney suburb. Big gardens on big blocks mean big trees, and big trees mean roots.

The clay earthenware drainage laid through the 1950s-70s boom is exactly the kind of pipe those roots go looking for. A joint that's held for sixty years can still let a root in eventually.

Where the ridge falls away toward the eastern reserves in gullies and undulating slopes, waste water and stormwater both run downhill fast. Debris concentrates at the low points on those sloping garden blocks.

Two things to watch on the same eastern-side property, then: root-choked sewer lines under the lawn, and stormwater pits struggling where the land tips toward the reserve.

Blocked drain repair is the fix for the clay-pipe side of things. Blocked stormwater takes care of the slope and gully pattern.

Not every block here is a rambling quarter-acre, either. Later unit and townhouse infill has gone up around the shopping village on Mona Vale Road.

Strata drains face the same root problem in a different shape: shared lines serving several dwellings, where one intrusion can affect every unit on the run. We work with owners corporations and individual owners the same way, camera first, one fixed price agreed before anyone starts.

The 123-hectare Ku-ring-gai Wildflower Garden further along Mona Vale Road shows just how much bushland still presses in against the built-up blocks. That's the same bushland pressure driving root growth into private drains on the properties nearby.

The garden-block, gully-slope combination points to a specific service set for this suburb.

Licensed under NSW plumbing licence #275278C, and every job we finish carries a lifetime labour warranty.

Down Mona Vale Road from Pymble is a drive we make constantly, not occasionally, which is why the quarter-acre blocks near the Showground feel as familiar to us as the units around the shopping village.

No train station serves this suburb directly, so buses along Mona Vale Road do the job instead, linking through to Gordon and Pymble. Being on that road ourselves most weeks is exactly why the coverage works so well.

That same bushland edge cuts both ways for homeowners here: it's the reason the streets feel the way they do, and it's the reason bushfire-season vegetation clearing along the Garigal boundary happens every year without fail. Root growth carries on regardless of the fire season.