Emergency work
Blocked drains and sewer in Zeist
Water standing still, a gully overflowing, or the same blockage for the second time.
Phone answered
07:00 to 22:00, every day
Travel time
usually 40 to 80 minutes
Call-out charge (voorrijkosten)
€ 25 on top before 08:00, after 18:00 and on Sundays
Problems
How we go about it
What you can do until we arrive. Take everything off the affected pipe: no washing machine cycle, no dishwasher, no long shower. Resist adding another bottle of drain cleaner, which only makes the water hazardous for whoever opens the pipe. If you can locate the access point (ontstoppingsstuk), which will be down in the crawl space or out in the front garden, photograph it and move whatever is stacked on top.
How we clear it. A rodding spring through the nearest opening comes first, and the high-pressure jet only comes off the van when the spring has failed. Reversing that order is how old clay pipe with an open joint gets turned into a repair, because a jet finds the weakest seam and lifts it.
When it keeps coming back. Twice inside a year at the same spot and the camera goes in, with the recording handed to you afterwards. On that footage you can see whether roots are the cause, how many metres out from the house they sit, and whether a spot repair, a liner or replacing that length is the sensible spend. Without it you are buying the same clearance over and over.
Start with what still empties, because that alone narrows it down. Toilet standing full while the shower and the sink run away fine? The obstruction is within a metre or two of the pan. Everything backing up at once? Then it is further out, in the vertical stack or in the buried run to the street, and somebody has to open the rodding eye.
That rodding eye is a Dutch fitting worth learning the name of: an ontstoppingsstuk, a capped access point set into the drain, usually in the front garden or down in the crawl space, put there so the pipe can be cleared without a spade. It is the first thing we look for on arrival. Find it and photograph it before we get there and you have saved yourself billable minutes.
Sand does not settle, and that deletes the number one cause you will read about elsewhere. Drains here keep the fall they were laid with; the sagging pipe that fills half the diary in the polders is close to a non-event on the Heuvelrug. What takes its place grows above the pipe rather than under it. Zeist is a town of avenues, and along the Utrechtseweg, the Bergweg and the Hogewegen full-grown beech and oak stand a few metres from the garden boundary, over drains that in the older streets are still vitrified clay (gres) or concrete, laid in short lengths with a joint roughly every metre.
Roots read those joints as a water supply. A few hairs through a seam become a mat, and the mat then combs out every solid that floats past. Rodding tears the mat and leaves the root, so the same metre closes again within a season. That is why a second blockage at the same point puts a camera down the pipe before it puts another bill on your table.
Can this wait until tomorrow?
Then there is no reason to sit in a queue. Put your number in the form with a line about what is going on, and the call back comes at an hour you name yourself. Write it in English.
Amounts
What it costs
One set of figures for the whole site. No emergency tariff exists that waits until somebody is standing in your hallway to introduce itself.
All rates and how time is counted
If the job takes longer than estimated.
On the doorstep you are told what looks necessary and roughly what that comes to. Should the job turn out bigger, you hear it while the panel is still off, not two weeks later on paper. Nothing past € 400 happens until you have said yes to it.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Call-out charge | € 45 |
| Hourly rate | € 65 to € 85 |
| Out-of-hours surcharge | € 25 |
| After the first hour | per 15 min |
| Parts | separate |
One call-out charge covers the visit. Tap and sanitary work bill at the lower hourly figure; jetting, camera work and boilers at the higher one. A flat amount joins the bill before 08:00, after 18:00 and on Sundays, never a percentage of anything. Quarter hours are counted after the first hour, and every part gets its own line.
What matters here
Background
The older streets of Zeist and Den Dolder still have their house connection in clay or concrete, with the access point either in the front garden or down in the crawl space. Out on the large plots in Bosch en Duin and Austerlitz that privately owned run is long as well as old, which simply means more joints, and every joint is an invitation. Kerckebosch is the opposite case: the old blocks there have largely been rebuilt and the drainage under them is young plastic in continuous lengths, so a blockage in that quarter is a bad connection or ordinary use, and almost never root ingress.
The flats of Vollenhove and parts of Zeist-West raise a different question. Several homes empty into one vertical stack (standleiding), so a blockage down at the bottom is nobody in particular problem and everybody in particular problem. Who calls and who pays follows from where the obstruction actually sat, so we measure that distance and write it on the invoice. Then the conversation with the owners association (VvE) or the landlord starts from a measurement instead of a suspicion.
Kitchens owe nothing to the soil. Cooking fat chills in a waste pipe running along a cold outside wall, sets, and from then on holds back everything that arrives after it. That is the commonest kitchen blockage anywhere and a rodding spring deals with it in under an hour. Caustic drain cleaner off a supermarket shelf seldom shifts a set plug of fat, while it will happily attack old clay, cast iron and the rubber seals between them. Poured a bottle down already? Say so on the phone: somebody is about to have their forearms in that water.
One boundary decides who pays. Your drain is yours as far as the property line and the municipality (gemeente) owns it from there to the sewer. Neighbours with the same trouble on the same evening point straight at the public side. The access point on the boundary settles it: standing full means the blockage is downstream of you, and clearing that is not a bill you should be receiving.
Where we come for this
- Plumber in Zeist (30 to 60 minutes)
- Plumber in Den Dolder (35 to 70 minutes)
- Plumber in Austerlitz (40 to 80 minutes)
- Plumber in Bosch en Duin (35 to 70 minutes)
Not sure whether this counts as an emergency?
Water standing on a floor, nothing working at all, a drain backing up over the rim: ring. Anything that can stay as it is until tomorrow can go through the form, and it will be at the top of the list early in the morning.
What is a blockage going to cost me?
Both figures you need for the sum, coming out and the hour, are printed further down this site, and one blocked trap or one blocked pan is normally clear well inside that hour. The moment high-pressure equipment, a lifted gully or a camera enters the picture, the extra amount is said out loud before it starts. That is the whole point of publishing the numbers.
I rent. Is this mine to pay or my landlord to pay?
The Dutch rule of thumb: whatever you could reach yourself, a sink trap or a gully in the garden, sits with the tenant, and the vertical stack and the buried drain sit with the landlord or the owners association (VvE). Because that split turns entirely on location, we note the distance and the position of the blockage on the invoice. Do check with your landlord before you book if there is time, because plenty of them are tied to one firm.
Is it my drain or the municipal sewer?
Yours up to the property line, the municipality of Zeist beyond it. If the neighbours are standing in the same water, the public sewer is the likely answer. The access point on the boundary gives the proof: full to the brim means the obstruction is on the street side, and the gemeente clears that at their cost, not yours.
Can somebody come today?
Between 07:00 and 22:00, which is the window every day of the week, that is nearly always yes. On the phone you are given a time range that fits your address and the jobs already running, and it stays a range, because a plumber who promises you a minute is guessing at your expense.
The other problems we fix
Not urgent
Leave us your number
This is for anything that can keep until tomorrow. Standing water, or nothing working at all, belongs on the phone instead: nobody watches this form all evening. English is fine.