Blocked Kitchen Drain in Balgowlah: Years of Grease Finally Caught Up

The situation

A Balgowlah homeowner called us about a blocked kitchen drain. It was an emergency call, but not the middle-of-the-night kind: we arranged to get there as soon as it suited the customer’s schedule and headed out to sort it.

What we found

The cause was one of the most common blockages we see: a kitchen line running into a gully, blocked solid with grease.

It builds up gradually. Every time oil and grease from cooking goes down the kitchen sink, it travels down the line into the gully outside, where the water sits and slowly drains away. While it sits there, the oil and grease sitting in that slow-moving water hardens. Do that for long enough, over years, and the hardened grease builds up layer on layer until it finally chokes the pipe completely.

It’s a job we get called out for regularly. Almost every kitchen line will build up some grease over time, and it’s really just a matter of when, not if, it causes a blockage.

The fix

Clearing hardened grease needs more than a plunger or a cheap drain snake, it’s set hard inside the pipe. We used high-pressure water jetting to cut through the blockage and scour the grease off the pipe walls, and had the line running freely again within one to two hours.

The outcome

The kitchen drain was back to normal the same visit, with no need to dig up or replace any pipework, just clear it out.

If your kitchen sink is draining slowly or a gully outside is starting to smell, don’t wait for it to seal shut completely. Our blocked drains team is available 24/7 across Balgowlah and the rest of the Northern Beaches, and can clear grease blockages like this one with high-pressure water jetting on the spot.