Most homeowners have had a drain snaked. Fewer have had one jetted, and the distinction between the two explains a frustration a lot of people share: why the same line keeps blocking despite being "cleared" repeatedly.
What snaking does
A drain cable — a snake — is a flexible steel line with a cutting head, driven down the pipe by a motor. It bores through the obstruction and restores flow.
That is genuinely useful, and for a lot of blockages it is the right tool. A solid obstruction, a heavy root mass that needs mechanical cutting, or a single fixture branch that has simply packed up — all cable work.
What a cable does not do is clean the pipe wall. It makes a hole in the blockage. Everything coating the circumference of the pipe stays exactly where it was.
What jetting does
A jetter drives water through a specialised nozzle at pressures up to roughly 4,000 PSI. Rear-facing jets propel the hose up the line while forward and side jets scour the wall as it travels, stripping grease, soap, sludge and softened scale and flushing the debris down to the main.
The result is not a channel through the clog. It is the original inside diameter of the pipe, with a clean wall that has nothing left on it for the next round of debris to catch on.
Choosing between them
| Situation | Right tool |
|---|---|
| Single fixture, first time it has blocked | Cable |
| Heavy woody root mass | Cable first, then jet |
| Kitchen or commercial grease line | Jetting |
| Recurring clogs on the same line | Camera first, then jetting |
| Sludge or sediment in a main line | Jetting |
| Preparation before installing a liner | Descale, then jet |
| Suspected structural damage | Camera — neither, until you know |
When jetting is not safe
This matters, and it is where an honest contractor will slow you down rather than sell you the bigger service.
On sound pipe, jetting is safe. On cast iron that has already corroded through, or a line with existing cracks or an open joint, pressure will find that weakness. It does not create the fault, but it can turn a hairline problem into an obvious one.
That is precisely why we camera an unfamiliar line before jetting it rather than after — and why on heavily tuberculated cast iron the correct sequence is mechanical descaling first, with jetting used to flush out what the descaler knocked loose.
When neither is the answer
If a line has been properly jetted and still blocks, the problem is not debris. It is the pipe: a belly holding standing water, an offset joint catching solids, or a diameter that scale has permanently reduced.
At that point more cleaning is just an annual subscription to a problem with a one-time fix. A camera inspection tells you which it is, and what ending it actually costs.