Commercial Drainage Horsham | What Landlords Must Know
Grease traps, planned maintenance and legal obligations for Horsham landlords and business owners.
Half the blocked drains I survey in RH12 and RH13 were predictable. Not in a vague, 'pipes age' way. Predictable in the sense that someone knew there was a problem, wrote it on a snagging list, and then nothing happened. That pattern shows up in rental kitchens in Roffey, in the shared drainage stacks of commercial units on Broadbridge Heath's trading estates, and in the takeaway grease traps around the Carfax. The camera doesn't lie, and what it usually shows is neglect that accumulated slowly, then failed expensively.
This post is for landlords with residential or commercial tenants, and for business owners who run kitchens, food units or multi-occupancy premises. The obligations are real, the costs of ignoring them are real, and most of what goes wrong is avoidable.
The grease trap problem nobody warns you about
Fat, oil and grease, collectively called FOG in the trade, is the single biggest cause of repeated commercial drain blockages. Hot fat goes down liquid and solidifies as it cools, coating the inside of your pipes with a layer that narrows the bore a few millimetres at a time. When I put a camera down a commercial kitchen drain that hasn't been maintained, the footage looks like the inside of a narrowing tunnel. Sometimes we're down to 30 or 40 percent of the original bore before anyone notices.
A grease trap intercepts that FOG before it reaches the sewer. If you run a food business, you almost certainly have a legal obligation to fit one under the Water Industry Act 1991 and the Sewer Adoption Agreement with Southern Water. Whether yours is working is a different question entirely. Many traps I inspect haven't been emptied in months, some longer. A full trap doesn't intercept anything; it just passes grease straight through.
What a maintained grease trap programme looks like in practice:
- Inspection and emptying every 4 to 12 weeks, depending on volume of cooking
- A service record you can show Southern Water if they inspect
- High-pressure water jetting on the downstream pipe at least annually
- A CCTV check every two to three years to confirm the pipe bore hasn't narrowed
If you're a landlord with a commercial tenant who runs a kitchen, the lease should specify who is responsible for grease trap maintenance. Many leases are silent on it. Silence is not protection; it's an argument waiting to happen when the shared sewer backs up into the unit next door.
Landlord obligations: residential lets
For residential landlords across the Horsham area, the picture is slightly different but no less important. The drain from a rented property to the public sewer is typically the homeowner's responsibility up to the boundary. Shared drains serving more than one property fall under Southern Water's remit, but the private lateral serving just your property is yours.
The Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018 requires landlords to keep properties free from hazards, and a blocked or structurally failed drain is a hazard. If a tenant reports drainage problems and you don't act, you're exposed.
Practically, what I'd recommend for any landlord with two or more properties in RH12 or RH13:
| Property type | Minimum schedule |
|---|---|
| Single residential let | CCTV survey at every tenancy change, or every 3 years |
| HMO (3+ tenants) | CCTV survey every 2 years, jetting annually |
| Commercial unit, no kitchen | CCTV survey every 3 years |
| Commercial unit with kitchen | Grease trap service every 4 to 12 weeks, CCTV annually |
A survey at tenancy change is particularly useful. It gives you a baseline condition report before a new tenant moves in. If there's damage at the end of the tenancy, you have evidence. If the drain is already cracked or root-affected, you know before you blame anyone.
Planned maintenance vs emergency call-outs
This is where the numbers make the argument plainly. Emergency drain unblocking at 2am on a Sunday is always more expensive than a scheduled jetting visit during the week. It disrupts tenants, it may require a plumber on top of a drainage engineer if the blockage has caused internal flooding, and it generates exactly the kind of complaint that ends up in a letting agent's file.
Planned maintenance contracts for commercial premises in the Horsham area work on a fixed schedule: agreed visit frequency, a named engineer, documented records. For landlords with a small portfolio, an annual jetting and CCTV package across multiple properties can often be arranged at a combined rate. Worth asking about when you call.
Root ingress is the other reason planned surveys earn their cost. Clay pipes in older properties across Tower Hill, Denne and Forest are well past their design life. Tree roots find the joints, force them open, and by the time you have a blockage the structural damage is already done. A CCTV survey in year one costs a fraction of what a collapsed pipe costs in year five.
Drainsco covers Horsham and the full RH12 and RH13 postcode area, with engineers available 24 hours a day. There's no call-out fee, and you'll have a clear price before any work starts. Remedial work, drain repairs and relining comes with a 20-year guarantee. If you've got a commercial premises, an HMO or a rental portfolio and you're not sure what state your drains are in, a camera will tell you in an hour what a surface inspection never could.
Priya Nair, CCTV survey and diagnosis specialist
Priya is the one who reads the camera footage. She handles the survey work, the pre-purchase reports and the build-over enquiries, and she will happily explain why a drain that keeps blocking almost always has a cause worth finding rather than a clear-out worth repeating.
Blocked drain in Horsham?
Engineers on call 24/7. A clear price before we lift a cover, and no call-out fee.
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