Drain cleaner

At one stage during a brief but torrential downpour yesterday our cobbled drive started to fill up with water coming down the lane. So today's first chore was to unblock the drain. Years ago I laid drain pipes under the lawn which come out into the side of the drive as you can see. Not thinking far enough ahead I just used the fairly narrow plastic tubes that are used as down-pipes. With hindsight I should have used the ones with larger diameter. There's also not much fall in the pipe but that's dictated by the lie of the land. I use an old Karcher pressure washer with a drain cleaning attachment which although expensive is one of the most useful accessories. It's just a long fairly narrow tube and water shoots backwards from the small ball on the end. So you feed it into the pipe at the bottom end and with a bit of encouragement it pulls itself along until it comes out at the top. Pull it back and a whole pile of crud comes with it. Repeat a couple of times and hey presto.