There is a difference between one fixture draining slowly and every fixture in the house refusing at the same moment, and it is worth knowing which you have before you call anyone. One is almost always a blockage in a branch. The other is usually something further down, and in parts of this suburb it is a machine.
Plenty of plumbing advice assumes your waste leaves the property by gravity. For a lot of the low-lying ground here that is simply not true, and it changes both what fails and how it fails. If you want someone on site, our blocked drain service covers the whole area.
If one fixture is slow, you have a blockage in that branch. If every fixture stops together, the fault is downstream of all of them, and on a pumped property that is most often the pump itself. A pump does not slow down first, so a sudden and total stop is the signature.
- Check whether more than one fixture is affected
- Look for a power interruption, at the board and the pump
- Stop putting water down the drain, the holding capacity is small
- Find out whether the pump is yours or Sydney Water's
- Call a licensed plumber before the well fills
On this page
1. First, work out whether it is one fixture or all of them
This takes two minutes and it decides everything that follows. Run the kitchen sink. Flush a toilet at the other end of the house. Run the shower. You are not trying to clear anything, you are working out how much of the system is affected.
If the ensuite is slow and everything else is fine, the fault is in that branch and it is a normal blockage. If the laundry, the kitchen and both toilets have all stopped, the problem is somewhere they all share, which is much further down.
Write down which fixtures are affected and roughly when it started. It is the single most useful thing you can tell a plumber on the phone, and it frequently changes what we bring.
2. Why, around here, that can mean a pump
Sydney's sewerage works on fall. Waste leaves the property, joins a bigger line, and keeps going downhill until it reaches an outfall. That works right up until the ground does not cooperate.
The low-lying land around the Balmoral slopes could not gravitate to the outfall sewer at all. The answer, from the 1920s onwards, was low-level pumping stations: collect the sewage at the bottom, then lift it back up into the gravity system through a separate pressurised line called a rising main. The Chowder Bay station was commissioned in 1926.
That was not a one-off. Greater Sydney now runs more than 600 low-level sewage pumping stations, all of them owned and operated by Sydney Water, and they exist precisely because some topography cannot rely on gravity.
The consequence is the failure behaviour. A gravity drain degrades. It gets slow, then slower, then backs up, and you usually get days of warning. A pump gives you none. It works perfectly until the moment it does not, and then nothing drains at all.
3. Check the power before you check anything else
This is the one almost nobody thinks of. If the property relies on a pump, then no power means no drainage. An outage does not just take the lights, it takes the ability to get waste off the property, and the holding capacity between the house and the pump is not large.
So before you assume a blockage: check the switchboard for a tripped breaker, check whether the pump has its own circuit or isolator, and check whether there has been an outage on the street. A pump that has been off for a few hours behaves exactly like a total blockage, and it is a far cheaper problem.
While nothing is draining, every load of washing and every long shower fills the well that much faster. Keep water use to a minimum until it is running again. This is the difference between a call-out and a clean-up.
4. What actually fails, and why wipes cost more here
A pumped system fails mechanically, not just physically, and there are only a few usual suspects.
- The float switch. It senses the level and tells the pump to run. When it stops sensing, the pump never starts, and nothing about the pump itself is wrong.
- The impeller. The part that does the moving. It jams on things that should never have been flushed.
- The non-return valve. It holds the contents of the rising main up after each cycle. When it stops holding, the line drains back down every time, and the pump ends up doing the same work repeatedly.
- The power supply. Covered above, and worth ruling out first because it is free to check.
Wipes are a different order of problem here. In a gravity line a wipe is a blockage: unpleasant, but a clean-out. In a pump it wraps around the impeller, and that is a mechanical failure. Nothing labelled flushable belongs in a pumped system, and that includes the ones that say they break down.
Nothing draining at all?
If every fixture has stopped, do not wait it out. A licensed plumber can be on the way, 24/7.
5. Whose pump is it, yours or Sydney Water's?
This decides who you should be calling, and it is worth knowing before you need it rather than at ten at night.
The 600-plus low-level stations across Sydney belong to Sydney Water. They serve whole streets or pockets of a suburb, they sit on public land, and they are Sydney Water's to maintain. If one of those is down, the fault is not on your property and it is not yours to fix.
A pump inside a private boundary that serves a single property is a different thing entirely. That one is the owner's, including the power that runs it, and it is maintainable in a way a buried gravity line simply is not.
A buried gravity drain gives you very little to inspect. A pump gives you a float, a valve and an impeller that can all be checked before they strand anybody. If the property is on one, that check is worth doing on a schedule rather than after a failure.
6. Four things that make it worse
- Pouring drain cleaner in. It will not free a jammed impeller or fix a float, and it turns the water a plumber has to work in into something caustic.
- Repeatedly resetting the breaker. If a pump is drawing enough to trip a breaker, something is wrong with it. Cycling it can turn a repair into a replacement.
- Running the washing machine to "flush it through". On a stopped system that is another 50-plus litres with nowhere to go.
- Waiting to see if it clears on its own. A gravity blockage sometimes eases. A stopped pump never does.
7. When this is genuinely urgent
Call straight away if there is sewage surfacing anywhere, inside or out, if the overflow relief gully is discharging, or if the property is occupied and nothing has drained for several hours. Under NSW tenancy law a blocked or broken toilet is an urgent repair, so renters are not obliged to sit on this one.
It can reasonably wait until morning if a single fixture is slow, everything else is fine, and nothing is overflowing. We would rather tell you that than charge you to attend in the dark, though on a stopped pump the honest answer is usually no.
- One slow fixture is a branch blockage. Every fixture stopping together is downstream of all of them.
- Parts of this area drain by pump, not gravity, because the ground falls below the sewer main.
- A gravity drain warns you by getting slower. A pump gives no warning at all.
- No power means no drainage, so check the switchboard before you assume a blockage.
- Sydney Water owns the street pumping stations. A pump inside your boundary is yours.
Everything stopped FAQs
How do I know if my property is on a pump?
The clearest signs are a pump well or a control panel somewhere on the property, an alarm you have never had explained, and land that sits low relative to the street. If you are not sure, say so when you call and we will work it out on site. It is also worth asking Sydney Water whether your street is served by a low-level pumping station.
Why did everything stop at once with no warning?
Because that is how a pump fails. A gravity drain gets progressively slower as a blockage builds, so you get days of notice. A pump either runs or it does not, so the first symptom is usually the total one.
Is a power outage really enough to stop my drains?
On a pumped property, yes. The pump needs electricity to lift waste into the gravity system, and the storage between your house and the pump is small. It is the failure mode people are least prepared for and the easiest to plan around.
Are flushable wipes really a problem?
They are a worse problem on a pumped system than a gravity one. In a gravity line a wipe contributes to a blockage. In a pump it wraps the impeller, which is a mechanical failure rather than a clean-out. Nothing but the three Ps should go down a toilet on a pumped system.
Who pays if the fault is at a Sydney Water pumping station?
Sydney Water owns and maintains those, so a fault at one of them is not yours to fix or fund. The part worth paying a plumber for is establishing where the fault actually is, because that is the answer that decides who you call.
Can a pump be maintained rather than replaced?
Usually. The float switch, the non-return valve and the impeller are all serviceable items, and checking them is a great deal cheaper than a failure. That is the one genuine advantage a pumped property has over a buried gravity line, which offers almost nothing to inspect.