Plumbers & electricians in Otford and Shoreham

Otford and Shoreham sit in the Darent valley where the river cuts through the North Downs, and both keep a core of flint and brick cottages round a church, with Otford’s listed pond and the ruins of the archbishops' palace at its heart and Shoreham’s chalk cross, cut into the hillside in nineteen twenty, looking down on the river. The newer Otford came in layers. Greenhill Road was laid out in the nineteen twenties as large plots, developed mostly between the wars and then split up for more houses after nineteen forty five. Tudor Drive went up in the later nineteen thirties as mock Tudor villas, Colet’s Orchard as a cul-de-sac of bungalows in the early nineteen sixties, and Leonard Avenue still has terraces from around eighteen sixty beside the pairs of semis that replaced the houses bombed in nineteen forty.

Up on the downland the pattern changes. Knockholt is mostly a ribbon of houses along the lanes on the dip slope, surrounded by Green Belt fields. Badgers Mount grew on farmland after the First World War. Halstead has Fort Halstead, the old military research site, where permission was granted in twenty twenty three for six hundred and thirty five homes.

West of Sevenoaks the district picks up Chevening, Sundridge and Ide Hill, whose church stands on the Greensand ridge as the highest in Kent.

Rats coming in through the drains

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Brown rats live in the public sewer, and a sewer is joined to every house on it by a private drain. A sound drain is a closed tube, so a rat can travel up it and has nowhere to go. The trouble starts when the tube is not closed. The older runs out here are salt glazed clay in short lengths, and a displaced joint or a cracked pipe gives a rat a gap into the soil, which it will dig along until it finds a void under a floor or behind a bath panel. Extensions and plot divisions add a second route that people rarely think about. When a kitchen moves or an outside WC comes down, the old branch is often cut off and buried rather than sealed, and an open pipe end underground is a doorway straight off the drain. Many older houses also have an interceptor trap in the last chamber before the sewer, a bend of water meant to keep sewer gas and rats out, with a rodding arm above it closed by a stopper. If that stopper has been knocked out or has corroded away, the trap is bypassed completely and the chamber is open to the sewer. From there the last step is easy, through the gaps where waste pipes pass through walls and floors, which were often never filled.

What people notice first is scratching in a wall, under a floor or behind boxing, usually at night. Then droppings under the bath or in the kitchen units, and sometimes a stale smell.

Poison on its own does not end it. It deals with the rats already in the house, and the route stays open for the next ones. The drain is found with a CCTV survey from the inspection chamber, which shows the broken joint, the open branch or the missing stopper for what it is. A single bad joint can be dug out and replaced, or patched from inside without digging. A longer cracked run can be lined. A redundant branch is capped where it leaves the live drain, a stopper is refitted, and in the chamber a rat barrier, a one-way flap on the outlet, lets waste out and stops anything coming back up. Which of those a house needs depends entirely on what the camera finds.