Blocked Drains Noosaville

Cleared today, contained well, explained well

Blocked Drain Specialists for Noosaville

Drainages go bad slowly and then suddenly. Kitchen sink draining has slowed slightly from last month. Shower begins to puddle. When the washing machine drains there is a gurgle. But one morning the water rises, rather than drops, and in a suburb that runs on holiday bookings and riverfront dining, that's not always a convenient time.

There is one thing about Noosaville that makes it truly unique among all the suburbs we service, and it is worth saying plainly at the top of our page. All the things here flow towards water, which has a lot of importance. The Noosa region has had UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Status since 2007. Noosaville is encircled by the Noosa River, abuts to Lake Weyba and Weyba Creek and contains a canal system at Noosa Waters linked directly to the same estuarine system. In this suburb, the end of a blocked sewer is not some distant “drain”, it's a river people swim in, fish in, paddle on and run an economy along.

That doesn't alter the technicalities of unblocking a blockage. It does alter the order of operations, and it does impact the strength of the advice we give you to address an ongoing issue correctly instead of clearing it annually. A canal front property with an overflowing drain that the owners have chosen to “just live with” is not merely an inconvenience, it poses an annual risk of contaminated water reaching a waterway that all Noosa residents rely on.

From blocked drains on the riverfront cottages and Gympie Terrace businesses, to Hilton Terrace houses, Noosa Waters canal properties, holiday complexes with low-rise holiday homes and Munna Point and the Lake Weyba side, Apex Essential Services completes every important job using a CCTV camera down the line so you know what's going on, not by anyone's word.

What Actually Blocks Noosaville's Drains

1. Grease from the riverfront kitchens

Gympie Terrace was established as a commercial street at least since the 1930s (when there were about 60 houses and shops along the street by 1933) and was reconstructed in the late 1990s, becoming the eating promenade that it is today. Add Thomas Street, the Weyba Road restaurants, the craft breweries and you have one heck of a lot of commercial cooking happening in a small space.

When fats and oils are heated, they flow like water, and when they are cooled, they solidify into wax, which is closer to candle wax. Layer on layer, the diameter of the pipe becomes smaller and eventually a plug of food scraps does the rest. A domestic kitchen can take years; a commercial kitchen, with two services a day can do this in months. The defence is the grease trap, assuming it is on a service schedule! When the trap is filled, it is no longer a trap and the line downstream begins to catch what it should have caught.

2. Wet wipes and unflushables, multiplied by turnover

Toilet paper is designed to disintegrate about 30 seconds after getting wet. The wet wipes are designed to be strong, they are made to last and some even have plastic fibres in them that don't break down your whole life through. They flush beautifully and then catch the first bend, joint or root and begin collecting all the rest of the trail.

Noosaville does this more than most suburbs as the majority of its housing is short stay, new guests in new bathrooms every couple of days, all year round. The guest has no relationship with pipes that they will never see again.

3. Hair, soap and sand

With new residents arriving at short-stay units every few days all year long, clogging is much quicker than owners in another state might think, as hair forms a dense mat in the drain with soap residue that the hot water can't move.

There's another local addition to the mix in Noosaville: sand. From the river beaches to Main Beach just a few minutes away, to the paddleboards, kayaks and fishing equipment attached to your Noosa River holiday, there's a whole lot of sand going down the washing machine, shower etc. Sand does not dissolve or decompose and is heavier than water so it settles out at the first place of reduced flow (which includes any dip or grease coating) to form a dense concrete like deposit. Very responsive to high pressure jetting; even more so to a rinse-off area outside and a good mesh catcher on shower waste.

4. Settlement on the canal estates

This is the drainage pattern of Noosa Waters and on low ground adjacent to the river. The Noosa Waters subdivision was started in 1990, and a vast network of man-made canals were built, and lands that were filled or reclaimed settled unevenly over the next few decades.

Hard pipe that is installed in settling ground cracks at the joints and forms “bellies” (sagged areas) during use where waste and water stagnate between use rather than drain away. A belly is a factory of blockages. The stuck solids in the still water bind grease and sand particles to them, and the same place is clogged all the time, regardless of the care put into the house. Then the tide gets involved: groundwater under these blocks fluctuates with the water in the canal, and any joint opened below the tidal range picks up groundwater two times a day, adding to the pressure of load on the sewer and further undermining the bedding of the pipe.

5. Tree roots in the older streets

It's easy to think that Noosaville is modern, but the river was settled long before the war, with electricity only coming in in 1947 and only about 430 dwellings on the river by 1967. The houses behind Gympie Terrace are predominantly from the 40's, 50's and 60's, and many of the houses have earthenware clay sewer drains, laid in short sections, with a joint about every metre.

Over the years, earth's movement breaks open those joints and a root filament as thin as fishing line penetrates through the opening and into the warm and nutrient-rich water within. After a season or two it's a mat of fibre that traps all of the household's things. In the Sunshine Coast, Noosa and Moreton Bay part of the Unitywater network, tree roots are the primary known cause of wastewater blockages: around 20 per cent of wastewater blockages where a cause could be determined were attributed to tree roots and amongst the worst listed species are moisture seekers such as figs, bottlebrushes and paperbarks.

The Noosa Waters and the subsequent properties are a different ball game: they have modern PVC construction and the rubber ring joints are fully sealed, which means that root ingress is far less common, and when it occurs it is usually at a single joint and not at other joints that are fully sealed. That's important since a localised problem is likely easy to patch on a sectional rather than reline the entire length of the line.

6. Storm season and the tide

From November to March, storm cells come in contact with low-lying ground with little to work with, when it comes to fall. Unlike hillside lines, flat stormwater drains are not self flushing and leaves, sand and silt build up. A stormwater system operating at 80 per cent capacity during the whole winter simply crashes when the first heavy, wet cell comes along, and if this cell happens to be on top of a high tide, there is no place for water to drain. The low-cost version of this repair is a jetting in October, the high-cost version is a flooded garage in January.

Warning Signs Worth Acting On Early

• Gurgling. When a toilet or plughole is gurgling when the other fixtures are draining, it means air is pushing its way through a blockage and is the first definite sign you're going to know.
• Two or more fixtures operating at the same time but slowly. A single slow-running sink suggests a clog in one of the local pipes, while multiple slow running sinks indicate a potential problem further along in the main pipe, or, for a complex, in shared drainage.
• Toilet water levels. If the water levels in the toilet are high or low or if the toilet starts bubbling after it has been flushed.
• Sewage odours. Odours of sewage in the yard, bathroom, laundry or in surrounding common areas of a complex.
• Overflow relief gully flowing during dry conditions. The round grate outside is the intentional relief point for your sewer, so don't cover it with concrete, plant a garden around it or place a pot on it or the overflow will be taken into the house.
• A green stripe or continually wet earth along the line of the drain, which is caused by a fractured pipe that is leaking into soft ground.
• Symptoms, not water use, that follow the tide. That's a diagnosis waiting to happen, as above.

It is at this point that almost all of it is a simple clearing job of the day. The endgame is waste rising up through the lowest drain in the building: health hazard, plumbing emergency, environmental issue, and for an occupied holiday unit and/or a trading restaurant, commercial issue.

Low-Rise Complexes and Shared Drainage

Especially when it comes to the holiday accommodation, Noosaville looks nothing like the high-rise suburbs down the coast. Noosaville contains resort complexes and apartment buildings designed horizontally, rather than the more traditional vertical stack that runs through twenty floors. Low-rise blocks, a row of townhouses, a garden complex with several individual buildings sharing a common drainage system across a site are common in Noosaville.

That creates a very unique diagnostic challenge. A tower with a blocked stack is easily recognisable, where the blocked stack appears straight up. In a complex which is spread-out, waste from many buildings runs together on horizontal lines between buildings and overflows onto any fixture whose outlet is lowest, and this could be at a ground-floor fixture in a different building altogether. Just looking for that symptom wastes hours, knowing how the site is plumbed and inserting a camera into the shared line does the right thing.

When you are located on the ground floor, and your problems with the drains aren't occurring with the rest of the other units, the fault is very likely not yours but rather a problem with the common infrastructure. Notify the person in charge of the building, suspend water use if possible and call. We routinely clear common lines, and the footage shows precisely where the fault is for the body corporate to record, which is important since lot owners are not expected to pay to repair the common property.

How to Unclog Noosaville Drains, and Keep Them Clear

1. Contain, assess and locate. If something is escaping towards a waterway, that's stopped first. Then: sewer or stormwater drainage, private line or shared complex drainage, kitchen branch or main run? If the site is read correctly before anything is put into the pipe, then the correct tool is first in the pipe.
2. Properly remove the blockage. The workhorse is the high-pressure water jetter, water at several thousand psi charged through purpose-cut nozzles, that cut root masses, break out set grease, and scour the pipe wall back to its full original diameter. That last part is important because punching a channel through a grease deposit will make it flow again for weeks, but if you scour the wall the pipe is restored. Some internal drains, and shared complex drains are appropriate for an electric drain cleaning machine with cutting heads.
3. Camera the line. A CCTV drain camera is fitted to the pipe and will travel the length of the pipe to find out what has caused the blockage and answer the question that prevents a second visit, why did this block? Grease build-up, root entry at a particular joint, settlement belly containing standing water, sand in a low area, wipe mass. You watch it with us on the screen and you keep the footage.
4. Locate any fault to the centimetre. A surface locator tracks the camera head, providing a precise record of what position and depth the camera was in. That's the difference between a repair job done on a canal block, or even in a strata complex where the fault may lie beneath a pool surround, a paved courtyard, a driveway or common landscaping, and an excavation no one in the building planned for.
5. State the actual options, side by side. Sound pipe: done, with footage, and we won't beat around the bush if it was usage related instead of pipe related. Fault found: the real alternatives that compete with one another, including maintenance clearing, a sectional patch, a full relining or excavation if all other options are exhausted. For strata and commercial jobs, the quote and footage are forwarded to the committee or owner in a format that can be decided upon.

Ending the Repeat Blockage: Permanent Fixes

Pipe relining, an ideal method for this landscape

Relining creates a smooth, unjointed new pipe, by pulling a resin-lined liner into the damaged pipe and hardening it in place. All cracks, open joints and root entry points in the relined area are sealed immediately, and most quality liners guarantee the work for decades. The technology has been proven on a large scale. Across this area, Unitywater have relined their network kilometre by kilometre, and have done around 25 kilometres of relining of the wastewater network in a two-year program throughout the Sunshine Coast and Noosa.

The no-dig factor is close to decisive for Noosaville. Canal and river-front blocks are heavily improved, paved courtyards, pool surrounds, decking, added landscaping, restricted boundaries and shared driveways in strata complexes. It's costly, destructive and a waste of time to dig through that before fixing it, and on low ground with a high water table, you're going to be dealing with ground water from start to finish with an open trench in place. All that is avoided by the relining, typically in a day's work.

Exception, and perhaps a warning, here: a liner conforms to the shape of a host pipe. It will patch a broken pipe or root-invaded pipe beautifully, but it isn't going to straighten a pipe that is really sagging. In the case of a bad belly, which may be a result of settlement on the filled canal ground, that section of pipe might require correction and not lining, and the camera will tell you which is which before anyone quotes anything.

Sectional patch repairs

If it's only one joint or just one root entry or one cracked collar, a patch liner is a much less expensive solution than a full reline. In the newer PVC areas, particularly, where faults are likely to be local, and not systemic, this often is the perfect answer, and we'll say so, and not quote the larger job.

Excavation, when it's the honest answer

There are times when a pipe is really collapsed or has been back-graded so much that nothing can be done to save it with a liner. When the footage shows it, we say it straight: plan the dig to do as little as possible, know to accommodate groundwater on low blocks, and price it accordingly, not sell a less expensive solution that we know won't do the job.

Three-Way Responsibility: You, the Body Corporate, Unitywater

The boundary issue in this type of suburb is a three-point affair. The general shape: pipes only used by your lot are yours, the complex piping and shared drainage used by more than one lot belongs to the body corporate, and Unitywater is responsible for the public water and sewer mains past the connection point.

For that to be practically useful, there are two things that need to happen. One of the first things to check before landscaping and before you assume a fault is private is which utility infrastructure is crossing the block. Unitywater has developed a free online mapping tool that can be used to enter an address and view any utility infrastructure that crosses the block. Second, camera footage resolves the issue with evidence not opinion: it identifies the side of which boundary the defect is on, so the cost is on the right side of the boundary. Committees, managers and insurers all move significantly faster on documented evidence than on competing assertions.

The Noosaville Drain Playbook

• Domestic kitchens: wipe down the pans before washing in the kitchen, have a jar for used cooking oil and put it in the bin when it is full, fit a sink strainer. Grease is the accelerant on almost every other type of blockage.
• Commercial kitchens: maintain a service schedule for the grease trap and log it. A serviced trap guards the line and the river, a full trap does neither, and the health inspector will notice too.
• Bathrooms: buy a few-dollar catcher cover for the shower waste, and place “check and clear the shower catcher” on the change over checklist in a holiday unit. Ten seconds, and the highest score in the clean.
• Sand strategy: shower feet, boards and gear outside on a grated well drained surface, not in the shower. Shake towels and swimmers out before putting them in the washing machine. Sand stopped at the door does not turn into concrete in the pipe.
• Toilets: only the 3 Ps. Place it in the guest folder and on a little bathroom card, guests flush what they're told to flush or what they're accustomed to flushing and only one of those is protecting your plumbing.
• Overflow relief gully: be aware of it and avoid placing paving, turf, decking and pots over it.
• On the canals: assume that if it's blocking twice in the same location, it's not a coincidence, it's a structural problem. The camera will display the belly or the crack, and very often, trenchless drainage solutions.
• Prior to storm season: gutters and surface grates cleaned in spring, and any slow moving stormwater pipes jetted in October. January is a month when flat, low-lying networks don't accept any excuses, particularly on a high tide.
• Buying here? The least expensive due diligence is a pre-purchase CCTV drain inspection. Bathroom renovations in a 1960s riverfront cottage are still connected to old 1960s clay, and settlement on a canal block does not appear in a typical building report.