Winter drain care comes down to four jobs: keep leaves out of gullies and gutters, keep fat out of the kitchen sink, protect exposed pipes from frost, and make sure storm water can get away. Do those through October and November and your drains will handle a South West winter. Empty holiday homes need one extra routine: a monthly flush-through.
Winter is when drains earn their keep in Cornwall and Devon. Atlantic storms arrive one after another, the trees drop everything at once, and then Christmas sends a month's worth of cooking fat down the kitchen sink in a fortnight. Most of the blocked drains we clear between November and February were entirely preventable in October. Here is the checklist we would run on our own homes, plus the shut-down routine for the second homes and holiday lets that sit empty here all winter.
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Job one: leaves, gullies and gutters
Leaves are the raw material of almost every autumn blockage. They collect on gully grates and dam the surface water; the smaller fragments wash through the grate and settle in the gully pot; and the sludge they become binds with silt and fat further down the pipe. The fix is boring and effective: clear every outside grate and gully pot in late October once the bulk of the leaves are down, then again a few weeks later. Scoop the pots out by hand, flush them through with a bucket of water, and check the water drains away briskly.
Gutters and downpipes are part of the same system. A blocked gutter overflows down the wall, and a downpipe packed with leaves delivers a compressed plug of them straight into the gully every time it rains. While you are up there, check the downpipe outlets actually discharge into the gully rather than beside it; years of small movements leave a surprising number pouring onto the path.
Job two: get storm-ready
A South West storm can drop enormous volumes of rain in a few hours, and every drain on your property is suddenly working at capacity. A system in good order copes: water backs up briefly at the height of the downpour, then clears as the rain eases. A system with a half-blocked gully, a silted run or a crushed section does not, and that is when water comes across the patio, into the garage, or up through the downstairs shower.
Storm-readiness means checking the escape routes before the weather arrives. Lift the manhole covers you can access and look: flowing water and a visible channel is good, standing water at rest is not. Walk the property in the first heavy rain of the season and watch where the water goes; pooling around a gully or a grate that has become a fountain both point to a restriction downstream. A run that struggles in every moderate downpour has lost capacity to silt and fat, and a proper clean-through restores it. If a winter storm does beat the drains and sewage starts backing up, that is what our emergency drainage service exists for, but the whole point of this checklist is that you never need it.
Job three: frost and exposed pipes
The good news: buried drains in Cornwall and Devon almost never freeze, because they sit below the depth frost reaches in our climate. The vulnerable pipework is the exposed stuff. Boiler condensate pipes running down outside walls are the classic winter failure, freezing solid in a cold snap and shutting the boiler down. External waste pipes from kitchens and utility rooms, and shallow runs serving outbuildings, garages and garden taps, are next in line.
The protection is cheap: foam lagging on every exposed pipe, fitted before December rather than during the cold snap when every merchant has sold out. During a hard frost, run warm water through little-used external waste pipes daily, and if a condensate pipe does freeze, a kettle of warm (never boiling) water poured along it usually frees it. Dripping overflows are worth fixing before winter too, because a slow drip becomes a sheet of ice exactly where you walk.
Job four: the Christmas kitchen
Ask any drainage engineer about the week between Christmas and New Year. Roast fat, turkey grease, cream, gravy and washing-up water full of all four go down the sink warm and liquid, then cool and set somewhere along the pipe. Add the leaf sludge already in the system and January produces a bumper crop of blocked kitchen runs.
The rules are simple. Fat, oil and grease go in a jar or tin, then in the bin, never down the sink. Scrape plates before rinsing. Wipe roasting trays with kitchen roll before washing. And once a week through the festive period, send a kettle of hot water and a squirt of washing up liquid through the kitchen run to keep what does get through moving. If your kitchen drain is already slow going into December, get it cleared before the season starts rather than during it.
Shutting down a holiday home properly
This patch has thousands of second homes and holiday lets, from Salcombe to Padstow to Fowey, that sit empty from October to Easter, and empty buildings are hard on drains in their own quiet way. Traps evaporate, so smells creep in and there is an open path for pests. Debris builds on grates with nobody there to notice. And a small problem in November becomes a big one by March simply because nothing was watched.
The shut-down routine: clear every gully and grate, flush every toilet and run every tap before leaving, so all the traps are full and clean. Leave toilet lids down. If the property will be totally unvisited, ask whoever checks it, cleaner, neighbour or agent, to run the taps and flush the toilets once a month, and to glance at the outside grates after big storms. For owners who would rather hand the whole thing over, a scheduled drain cleaning and maintenance arrangement covers the pre-winter clean and the periodic checks in one, which is considerably cheaper than reopening at Easter to find February's problem waiting.
The month-by-month checklist
| When | Do this |
|---|---|
| October | Clear gutters, downpipes, grates and gully pots after the first leaf fall. Lag exposed pipes. Book a clean for any drain already running slow. |
| November | Second leaf clear. Watch the first big storm and note anywhere water pools or backs up. Holiday homes: run the full shut-down routine. |
| December | Fat in the jar, not the sink. Weekly hot water and detergent flush through the kitchen run. Check lagging before the first hard frost. |
| January | Cold snaps: run warm water through exposed waste pipes daily. Empty properties: monthly flush-through of every fitting. |
| February | Post-storm checks on grates and gullies. Anything that has blocked twice this winter needs investigating, not clearing a third time. |
Frequently asked questions
How do I stop my drains blocking in winter?
Clear leaves from gullies, grates and gutters before and during leaf fall, keep fat and food waste out of the kitchen sink over the festive season, and flush outside gullies through monthly. Most winter blockages are autumn leaves and Christmas cooking fat meeting in a pipe that was already part-furred.
Can drains freeze in Cornwall and Devon?
Buried drains rarely freeze here because they sit below the frost line, but exposed pipework can: condensate pipes, external waste pipes, and shallow runs serving outbuildings. Lagging exposed pipes and keeping a trickle of use through them during cold snaps prevents nearly all of it.
How should I look after the drains in an empty holiday home over winter?
Before shutting up, clear the gullies, flush every fitting, and leave traps full of water so seals do not dry out and smells do not build. Have someone run the taps and flush the toilets monthly, and after any big storm check that outside grates are clear so the property does not flood while empty.
Why do my drains overflow during winter storms?
Storm rain arriving faster than the drains can carry it away will surcharge any system, but a healthy drain recovers as soon as the rain eases. If yours overflows in every moderate downpour, leaves, silt or a partial blockage have reduced its capacity, and clearing the run restores it.
Get your drains winter-ready before the storms arrive
We clean, clear and check drains across Plymouth, south east Cornwall and south and west Devon, including pre-winter services for holiday homes and lets. One visit in autumn beats an emergency in January.
Call DCI Drainage on 07418 000 420 Fast, free quotes · Local, independent, not a franchise
