Commercial Drainage Cirencester | Cut Your Risk

Running a rental property or a commercial unit in Cirencester comes with a list of responsibilities most people know about: gas safety checks, electrical testing, PAT certificates. Drainage, though, has a habit of sitting in a blind spot right up until something goes wrong at 11pm on a Friday.

This post is for landlords with residential lets in Chesterton, Watermoor or Siddington, for the café owner on Dollar Street, and for the commercial landlord with units out at Kemble Enterprise Park. The rules aren't identical for each of you, but the logic is the same: planned, documented maintenance costs a fraction of what emergency work costs, and it keeps you on the right side of your obligations.

What landlords are actually responsible for

Under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, you're responsible for keeping drains, gutters and external pipes in repair and proper working order. That phrase 'proper working order' matters. A drain that's slow, smelly or backing up isn't in proper working order, even if it hasn't flooded yet.

For residential landlords specifically:

• Drains that serve only your property are your responsibility from the property boundary outward to the point where they join a shared drain. A lateral drain is one that is shared between properties, and those shared lateral drains transferred to Severn Trent's ownership in October 2011 under the provisions of the Water Industry Act 2010. So if the blockage is in a shared section of the network beyond your boundary, that's their problem. The tricky part is working out which side of the boundary you're on. A CCTV drain survey will confirm it quickly.
• If a tenant causes a blockage through wet wipes, cooking fat or anything else they shouldn't have put down, that's a conversation about whose fault it is. But the law still requires you to get it sorted. Deal with the cause later, fix the drain now.
• Houses in Multiple Occupation attract heavier scrutiny. Your local authority can inspect, and drain condition will come up. A history of annual maintenance visits and a copy of any survey work is worth more than a verbal assurance.

For commercial properties, the lease agreement will usually allocate drain responsibility. Read it. Many full repairing leases put drainage maintenance firmly with the tenant. If you're the tenant, you need to know that before you sign, not when a drain backs up into your kitchen.

Grease traps: who needs one and why it matters

If you run any food business in Cirencester, grease is your problem whether or not you've thought about it. Fats, oils and grease cool and solidify in pipework. Combined with wet wipes and food debris, they build into fatbergs that block drains completely.

The Water Industry Act 1991 makes it an offence to discharge trade effluent into a public sewer without consent, and FOG-heavy discharge qualifies. Severn Trent can issue enforcement notices and charge for clearance of the downstream network.

A grease trap or grease recovery unit intercepts FOG before it reaches the drain. How often it needs emptying depends on the volume of your operation and the design of the trap. A commonly cited rule of thumb is to service when the floating FOG layer reaches around 25% of the working depth, but trap design and your local authority's guidance can shift that figure. For a busy kitchen, monthly servicing is a reasonable starting point; some operators go fortnightly. We can inspect and service grease traps as part of a commercial drainage contract, and we'll tell you honestly if the trap size is right for your output.

Signs your grease management isn't working:

• Drains slow in the kitchen only, not the toilets or washrooms
• A rancid smell from the floor gullies, especially in warm weather
• Drain backing up during service or busy periods
• High-pressure jetting needed repeatedly for the same run of pipe

That last one is a signal. Jetting clears the blockage, but if it's back within a few months, the grease trap or the behaviour upstream isn't doing its job.

Planned maintenance: what it actually looks like

An emergency call-out at 2am, a flooded kitchen, a compensation claim from a tenant. Any one of those costs more than a year's worth of scheduled maintenance visits. And unlike the emergency, the scheduled visits give you a paper trail showing you've taken the drain seriously.

For a residential landlord with a small portfolio in Stratton or The Beeches:

• An annual gully and manhole check at each property
• A CCTV survey every three to five years, more frequently if the houses are on older pipework
• A note in your records each time any drain work is done, with the date and what was found

For a commercial client, a drainage contract can be structured around your site. We service restaurants, care homes, office blocks, light industrial units and retail premises across the GL7 area. The contract covers scheduled visits, rapid response when something does go wrong, and written reports after every visit so you've always got documentation.

CCTV surveys and what they're used for

A CCTV drain survey sends a camera through the pipework and records what it finds. For landlords and commercial clients, the main uses are:

Before you take on a property. You can't see what's behind the inspection cover without a camera. Root ingress, collapsed sections, misaligned joints and years of grease build-up won't show on a visual inspection. Know what you're taking on before you commit.

When a problem keeps recurring. If you're jetting the same section of drain every few months, something structural is usually going on. The camera finds it.

At the end of a tenancy. A survey before and after a commercial tenancy gives you an objective record of drain condition. Useful if there's a dispute about dilapidations.

After repair work. We survey after relining or repair to confirm the fix is complete. Where we carry out remedial work, including drain repairs and relining, that work comes with a 20-year guarantee. The post-repair survey forms part of that documentation. The guarantee applies to the remedial work itself, not to blockage clearance.

Root cutting and older stock

Cirencester has a lot of older housing stock, particularly in and around the town centre, Watermoor and down towards South Cerney. Victorian-era and early-twentieth-century clay pipe drains are common in the older streets, and clay is durable but the joints are vulnerable to tree root intrusion. Once roots are in, they grow fast.

For landlords managing older properties, root cutting and descaling is worth factoring into your maintenance schedule if there are mature trees nearby. Left alone, roots will cause a blockage. Left longer, they'll cause a collapse, which means excavation or relining rather than a relatively simple clearance.

---

Drainsco covers Cirencester and the surrounding GL postcodes, including Kemble, Fairford, Tetbury and Northleach. If you want to talk through a maintenance contract or book a CCTV survey, give us a ring. There's no call-out fee, and you'll get a clear price before any work starts. Engineers are available around the clock.