Structural, Hydraulic and Electrical Engineers Australia

Most development budgets carry a line for “engineering” and most developers could not say, off the top of their head, exactly which drawings that line buys. Civil engineering usually gets thought about because it sits in the ground and shows up in the subdivision approval. The three disciplines that shape the building itself, structural, hydraulic and electrical, tend to be treated as a single lump until something falls between them.

That gap is where the money goes. A transformer that ends up 900 millimetres from where the architect drew it, a fire tank that nobody allowed a plant room for, a transfer beam that appears at design development and takes 400 millimetres off the ceiling height in every apartment above it. None of these are engineering failures. They are scope and sequencing failures, and they are usually avoidable.

This guide sets out what each of the three disciplines actually designs, when they are typically engaged, how they interact with each other and with the builder, and which of them your state now requires to be registered. The registration position in particular has changed a lot since 2021 and is still changing, so the figures, dates and scheme details here were current at the date of writing and the linked regulator page is where to confirm them for your project.

What does a structural engineer do on a property development?

A structural engineer designs everything that carries load: footings, slabs, columns, beams, walls, transfer structures, retaining walls, and the connections between them. The output is a set of structural drawings and specifications a builder can price and build to, supported by calculations that show the structure satisfies the structural provisions in Section B of Volume One of the National Construction Code and the relevant Australian Standards for concrete, steel, timber, masonry, wind and earthquake actions.

Building Commission NSW describes structural engineering as work that “involves being able to predict and calculate the stability, strength and rigidity of built structures, and how structures resist and transfer natural and other forces”. That phrase, resist and transfer, is the practical point for a developer. Structural cost is mostly a function of how far loads have to travel sideways before they reach the ground.

What the structural engineer produces at each stage

The deliverables generally step up in resolution, and the fee proposal should say which stage each payment buys.

Concept and feasibility. Often a short advice rather than drawings: indicative slab and column sizes, a view on whether the proposed grid works, and an early flag on anything unusual (long spans, cantilevers, a basement close to a boundary). This is the cheapest hour you will ever buy from a structural engineer, and it is the one most often skipped.

Development application stage. Enough structural input for the architectural set to be credible. Column locations and sizes, floor-to-floor dimensions that actually work once you allow for slab depth and services, and any structure that shows on the drawings the consent authority will assess.

Design development and construction documentation. The full set: footing design informed by the geotechnical report, slab and beam schedules, reinforcement detailing, steelwork connections, temporary works interfaces. In New South Wales, for a regulated building, this is also the stage where a registered design practitioner prepares regulated designs and makes design compliance declarations.

Construction phase. Responses to requests for information, review of shop drawings and contractor-proposed alternatives, site inspections at hold points, and sign-off documentation for the certifier.

What actually drives structural cost, and how much of it can you influence?

Structure is typically one of the largest single trade packages in a building, so small design decisions move real money. The levers most within a developer’s control tend to be:

Column grid and transfer structure. A basement car park wants columns every 8 metres or so. Apartments above want walls where the apartment walls are. When those two do not line up, the load has to be transferred, and transfer beams or transfer slabs are expensive in both material and programme. Getting the structural engineer into the room while the basement layout and the typical floor plate are still negotiable is generally worth more than any value engineering exercise later.

Basement depth and the water table. Each additional basement level adds excavation, shoring, waterproofing, tanking and often permanent dewatering or a heavier slab to resist uplift. The geotechnical investigation drives this, which is why the geotechnical report is usually commissioned before, not after, the structural engineer starts detailed work.

Span and slab type. Post-tensioned slabs, band beams, conventional reinforced slabs and composite steel decks all have different cost, depth and programme profiles. A shallower slab can buy floor-to-floor height, which can buy a storey within the same height control, which can be worth far more than the slab premium. This is a calculation worth doing explicitly rather than assuming.

Boundary conditions. Building to a boundary usually means a shoring system, and possibly permanent anchors requiring a neighbour’s consent. Anchors that cannot be agreed may force a stiffer, more expensive propped or piled solution.

Where these decisions are still open, they belong in the feasibility model, not in a note on a drawing. A change that adds a transfer level and 300 millimetres of structural depth per floor flows through to construction cost per square metre and can quietly consume the construction contingency before the first pour.

What does a hydraulic engineer do, and why is the title so confusing?

A hydraulic engineer, in a building context, designs the water systems inside and immediately around the building: cold and hot water supply, sanitary plumbing and drainage, stormwater within the site, trade waste, gas reticulation, rainwater and greywater reuse, and the water-based fire services such as hydrants and hose reels. The design generally has to satisfy Volume Three of the National Construction Code (the Plumbing Code of Australia), the AS/NZS 3500 series for plumbing and drainage, and the requirements of the local water authority.

The title causes genuine confusion because “hydraulic engineering” also describes a branch of civil engineering concerned with catchments, watercourses, flood modelling and large water infrastructure. Two different people can hold themselves out as hydraulic engineers and design completely different things. On a building project the role is often called a hydraulic consultant or hydraulic services engineer, and it is worth confirming which discipline you are buying before you sign a fee proposal. A catchment modeller and a building services designer are not interchangeable.

What the hydraulic consultant is usually responsible for

The scope commonly covers:

• Incoming water service, meter sizing and the connection application to the water authority
• Cold water, heated water and non-potable water reticulation, plus the plant that heats and pumps it
• Sanitary plumbing and drainage, including the sewer connection point and any pump-out arrangement where gravity fall is not available
• Stormwater within the site boundary, including the on-site detention or on-site retention tank if the council requires one
• Backflow prevention assessment across the site, which under AS/NZS 3500.1 includes fire services
• Fire hydrants and fire hose reels, and the fire water storage tank and pump set where the mains cannot deliver the required flow and pressure
• Gas reticulation and, increasingly, its absence where a project is being designed all-electric

Where hydraulic scope collides with civil and fire, and what it costs

The three most common gaps, in rough order of how much they cost when missed:

The fire water tank and pump room. If the street main cannot deliver the flow and pressure the hydrant system needs, the project needs a stored water supply and a pump set. That is a tank of real volume, a pump room with acoustic treatment, and often a dedicated electrical supply with a diesel back-up. Discovering this after the architectural plans are locked can mean losing a car space, a storage cage or a retail tenancy. The trigger is a flow and pressure test on the street main, and it is a cheap test to run early.

The stormwater boundary between civil and hydraulic. Civil usually takes the site from the legal point of discharge to the building line. Hydraulic usually takes it from the building. On-site detention tanks sit awkwardly in between, and so do basement ramp grates, pump-out pits and podium drainage. Two consultants each assuming the other has it produces either a duplicated tank or no tank at all.

Fire sprinklers. Sprinklers are frequently designed by a fire protection specialist rather than the hydraulic consultant, while hydrants and hose reels sit with hydraulic. Both draw on the same water supply and often the same tank. Where the split is not written into both scopes, the tank gets sized for one system and not the other.

None of this is exotic. It is the same three items on most mid-rise residential projects, which is why an early services coordination meeting, before the development application drawings are finalised, tends to pay for itself.

What does an electrical engineer do on a building project?

An electrical engineer designs the supply, distribution and use of electricity in the building: the incoming supply and any substation, main switchboard, distribution boards, submains, general light and power, emergency and exit lighting, fire detection and alarm interfaces, communications and data pathways, security and access control, lift power, and increasingly the electric vehicle charging infrastructure and any on-site generation or battery storage.

Building Commission NSW describes electrical engineering as involving “equipment, devices, plant and systems that use electricity, electronics and electromagnetism”. The Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland puts it more usefully for a developer, describing the area as covering “electrical installations in buildings and on industrial sites, instrumentation and control systems, communications networks” and the integration of those systems.

Supply and substations: the item most likely to move your programme

The single most programme-sensitive item in electrical design is usually the network connection. Above a certain load, the distributor will require a dedicated substation, and where that substation goes is a planning, structural and commercial question as much as an electrical one.

The typical sequence is that the electrical engineer estimates the maximum demand, lodges a connection enquiry with the distributor, and the distributor comes back with a connection offer that specifies the point of supply, whether a substation is needed, its type, and what the developer must provide. Distributors set their own lead times, and those lead times commonly sit outside a developer’s control.

The consequences for a feasibility model are worth naming:

• A chamber substation inside the building consumes floor area that would otherwise be lettable or saleable, needs its own structural provision, fire separation, ventilation and independent access, and usually needs to be near the street.
• A kiosk substation on the site consumes site area, has setback and access requirements, and can affect landscaping, deep soil and streetscape assessment.
• An easement in favour of the distributor may be required over the substation and cable route, which makes it a title outcome as well as a design one.

Electrification is pushing maximum demand up. All-electric apartment buildings, electric vehicle charging provision, and heat pump hot water plant all add load that a comparable gas-serviced building of five years ago did not carry. A demand estimate carried forward from an older comparable project is one of the more common ways a substation appears late.

Where electrical scope collides with everything else

Mechanical. Air conditioning and ventilation plant is a large electrical load and a large controls interface. Where the mechanical engineer’s plant selection changes, the electrical design changes with it.

Fire. Fire detection, occupant warning, sprinkler monitoring, fire mode operation of lifts and air handling, and emergency power supply all sit across electrical, mechanical, hydraulic and fire engineering. The interfaces are usually where commissioning delays come from.

Communications and security. Sometimes inside the electrical scope, sometimes a separate specialist, and quite often assumed to be included when it is not.

Energy efficiency. The energy efficiency provisions in Section J of Volume One of the National Construction Code bear on lighting power density, metering, and building services generally, so the electrical engineer’s design and the energy assessor’s report have to agree with each other.

Which engineering disciplines have to be registered, and where?

This is where the answer genuinely varies by state, and where it has changed significantly since 2021. The direction of travel across Australia has been towards mandatory registration of engineers working in the building industry, following the national Building Confidence review. The detail differs in scope, in which disciplines are captured, and in commencement date.

The practical question for a developer is narrower than the policy debate: is the person signing my drawings required to be registered, and are they?

New South Wales

Under the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 (NSW), a professional engineer must be registered to carry out professional engineering work on a regulated building. Building Commission NSW states that registration is required if you are doing professional engineering work in one of six areas, civil, electrical, fire safety, geotechnical, mechanical or structural engineering, and you are working on a class 2, 3 or 9c building or a building that includes a class 2, 3 or 9c part.

Two points a developer should note. First, the scheme is tied to building class, so a class 5 office or a class 7a car park standing alone is outside it. Second, an engineer who is not registered may still work under the direct supervision of a registered engineer, so “the engineer on my job is not registered” is not automatically a problem, but it is a question worth asking.

Registered engineers in New South Wales carry ongoing obligations, including holding appropriate insurance, retaining records for 10 years, and completing continuing professional development, currently framed by Building Commission NSW as 50 hours of relevant education and training per continuing professional development year. Details are on the Building Commission NSW professional engineer registration page.

Victoria

Victoria runs a broader scheme. Under the Professional Engineers Registration Act 2019 (Vic), engineers providing professional engineering services in a prescribed area must be registered with the Business Licensing Authority, and registration is not limited to a particular building class.

On top of registration, an engineer working in the building industry needs a building industry endorsement. Consumer Affairs Victoria states that “registered professional engineers who would like to provide professional engineering services to the building industry must have their registration endorsed”, and that this endorsement “has replaced the registration of building practitioners in the category of engineer under the Building Act 1993”. To obtain the endorsement, an engineer must demonstrate knowledge and practical application of Victorian building laws and standards and of the operation and use of the National Construction Code as it applies to their area of engineering, hold professional indemnity insurance as required by section 135 of the Building Act 1993 and the current Ministerial Order, and be assessed as a fit and proper person by the Building and Plumbing Commission.

Registration and endorsement in Victoria run for three years. The practical developer question is not just “are you registered”, it is “are you endorsed”, because an engineer can hold Victorian registration without the building industry endorsement. Consumer Affairs Victoria maintains a public register of professional engineers.

Queensland

Queensland has had the longest-running scheme in the country. The Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland states that anyone providing professional engineering services in or for Queensland is required by Queensland law to register as a Registered Professional Engineer of Queensland (RPEQ), unless they are working under the direct supervision of a Registered Professional Engineer of Queensland (RPEQ) or working only to a prescriptive standard.

Two features matter to developers. The Queensland scheme is not limited to the building industry, and the Board currently registers engineers across 19 areas of engineering including civil, structural, electrical, mechanical, fire safety, geotechnical and environmental. And the Professional Engineers Act 2002 (Qld) applies extraterritorially. The Board’s own worked example is a civil engineer based in Singapore working on a highway upgrade outside Cairns: the Act applies. So does the reverse, an engineer based in Brisbane working on a Sydney apartment building.

The Board maintains a searchable Registered Professional Engineer of Queensland (RPEQ) directory, which takes about a minute to check.

Western Australia

Western Australia commenced a building engineers registration scheme on 1 July 2024 under the Building Services (Registration) Act 2011 (WA). The Government of Western Australia states that registration of structural and fire safety building engineers commenced from 1 July 2024, and registration of civil and mechanical building engineers commenced from 1 July 2025, with a transition period running until 1 July 2027, after which “any person performing building engineering work after 1 July 2027 without the required registration, or outside the scope of their registration, will commit an offence and could be liable for a fine of up to $25,000”.

The Western Australian scheme has a feature the eastern states do not. It registers both practitioners (individuals) and contractors (businesses), and after the specified dates a registered practitioner is not entitled to contract directly with a client. Only a registered building engineering contractor can do that, and it must employ at least one registered practitioner as nominated supervisor. If you are engaging engineers in Western Australia, the entity you contract with matters as much as the individual who signs the drawings. Full details are on the Western Australian building engineering registration page.

Australian Capital Territory

The ACT’s scheme commenced on 6 March 2025 under the Professional Engineers Act 2023 (ACT). ACT Government material states you must be registered if you are offering professional engineering services in civil, structural, electrical, mechanical or fire safety engineering, whether provided in the ACT or from outside the ACT for an ACT project, unless the work is under direction and oversight or is provided in accordance with a prescriptive standard.

Engineers providing services to the building and construction industry face additional qualification and experience requirements assessed under the Professional Engineers (Qualifications, Experience and Competencies) Determination 2024 (ACT). Registration runs for a maximum of three years. The ACT maintains a public register of professional engineers.

One quirk worth knowing if you use interstate consultants: the ACT participates in automatic mutual recognition, but Queensland does not, so a Queensland-registered engineer cannot work in the ACT under automatic mutual recognition and an ACT-registered engineer cannot work in Queensland under it.

Northern Territory

The Northern Territory takes a different approach and is, on one point, ahead of everywhere else. The Building Practitioners Board registers certifying engineers in categories tied to what they can certify, and the scope of works table published by the Board lists a Certifying Engineer (Hydraulic) category alongside mechanical and structural.

The Board describes the hydraulic category as covering certification of “the design and/or construction of plumbing and draining works and hydraulic fire services servicing buildings or structures of all classes, including plumbing and drainage works (including on-site sewerage treatment systems), fire hydrants, fire hose reels and fire sprinklers/suppression systems”. The structural category covers certification of the design or construction of all classes of buildings in accordance with the structural provisions of the Building Code of Australia, and engineers registered in that category can apply for endorsement as an independent review engineer under the Building Regulations 1993 (NT).

Note that the Northern Territory categories are about who may certify, which is a narrower question than who may design. The Building Practitioners Board practitioners page sets out the current scope for each category.

Tasmania

Tasmania licenses engineers as building services providers under the Occupational Licensing Act 2005 (Tas), administered by Consumer, Building and Occupational Services, with the requirements set out in the Occupational Licensing (Building Services Work) Determination. Eligibility generally rests on holding a degree for the relevant engineer sub-class plus the relevant design experience, or on recognition through the National Engineers Register or as a Chartered Professional Engineer. The Consumer, Building and Occupational Services engineer licence page is where the current sub-classes and requirements sit.

South Australia

South Australia is the outlier. Consumer and Business Services consulted in 2023 on a proposed mandatory registration scheme, noting on the YourSAy consultation page that “there is currently no requirement for engineers in South Australia to be registered or have particular qualifications in order to deliver services”. The proposal contemplated a scheme covering civil, structural, hydraulic, mechanical, geotechnical, electrical and fire safety engineers in the building and construction industry. The consultation outcome had not been reported on that page at the date of writing, so the current status is worth confirming directly with Consumer and Business Services before relying on it either way.

The hydraulic gap nobody talks about

Read those eight jurisdictions together and one thing stands out. Hydraulic engineering is not a prescribed area of engineering in the New South Wales, Victorian, Australian Capital Territory or Western Australian building engineer registration schemes. Queensland does not list it among its 19 current areas either, having retired the Building Services area to new applications from December 2021. The Northern Territory registers a Certifying Engineer (Hydraulic), and South Australia’s 2023 proposal contemplated including hydraulic engineers, but the two largest development markets in the country do not require the person designing your water, drainage and hydrant systems to hold an engineering registration at all.

That is not an argument that hydraulic consultants are unqualified. Most are experienced and many hold professional credentials. It is an argument that the registration check that works for structural and electrical does not work for hydraulic in most of Australia, so the due diligence has to be done a different way: qualifications, professional indemnity insurance, comparable project references, and a clear written scope. Plumbing work itself remains separately licensed in every jurisdiction, but the design consultant sits outside the engineer registration schemes.

How does New Zealand handle it?

New Zealand does not run a mandatory building-engineer registration scheme in the Australian sense. It runs the Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng) regime under the Chartered Professional Engineers of New Zealand Act 2002, administered by Engineering New Zealand.

The practical gate is the producer statement. Building consent authorities commonly rely on a producer statement, a statement of the author’s professional opinion that an aspect of design complies with the Building Code, to support a building consent application. Engineering New Zealand’s guidance notes that while anyone can sign a producer statement, most building consent authorities will not accept one unless the author holds Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng) status. Building Performance guidance on producer statements confirms that producer statements are not mandatory and that acceptance is a matter for the building consent authority.

For a New Zealand developer the effect is similar to an Australian registration requirement, arrived at differently. The consent authority’s practice, not a registration statute, is what makes Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng) status the practical minimum on anything structurally significant. Confirming which producer statements the relevant council will accept, and from whom, before the design is committed tends to avoid a late and expensive re-issue.

When is each engineer engaged, and against what deliverable?

The sequence matters more than the calendar, because each discipline needs an input from someone else before it can do useful work.

Before the structural engineer can finalise footings, the geotechnical investigation has to be done. Commissioning structural documentation before the boreholes are drilled generally produces a design that is either over-conservative or gets re-issued.

Before the hydraulic consultant can size the fire water storage, the flow and pressure test on the street main has to be run and the fire strategy has to be settled. Before the sanitary drainage design is meaningful, the sewer connection point and available fall have to be confirmed with the water authority.

Before the electrical engineer can confirm the substation position, the maximum demand estimate has to be made and the connection enquiry lodged with the distributor. Because the distributor’s response time is outside your control, this is usually the earliest item on the services critical path.

Against that, a rough engagement order on a typical mid-rise residential project might look like: land surveyor and geotechnical investigation first, structural engineer at concept for grid and depth advice, hydraulic and electrical engaged before the development application drawings are locked so that plant space and substation position are designed in rather than retrofitted, then all three to full documentation once the consent is granted and the scheme is stable.

Bringing hydraulic and electrical in only after development consent is a common economy, and it is the one that most often generates the design changes that eat a contingency. Plant rooms, tanks, substations and risers do not compress. They either have space allowed for them or they take space from something that was going to be sold.

How are engineering fees usually structured?

There is no government-published fee scale for consulting engineers in Australia, so any figure quoted is market practice rather than a rate you can look up. Fees are commonly structured one of three ways, and the structure often matters more than the headline number.

Percentage of construction cost. Common on larger commercial and residential projects. Simple, but it means the fee moves with the cost estimate and it gives the consultant no particular incentive to design economically. If you use it, the base against which the percentage is calculated needs defining precisely.

Lump sum against a defined scope and stage. Usually the cleanest for a developer, because it makes the deliverable explicit. The trap is that anything outside the defined scope becomes a variation, so the scope definition is doing the real work.

Hourly rates. Common for early advice, peer review, expert work and construction-phase support where the volume is genuinely unknown.

Whichever structure is used, the fee proposal is the place to confirm what is actually included, and the items most often excluded are the ones that later feel like they should have been in: construction-phase site inspections, shop drawing review, responses to requests for information, re-design after a value engineering exercise, and design changes arising from a builder-proposed alternative.

A worked illustration

Take a hypothetical apartment project with a construction cost of $18,000,000. Assume, purely for the illustration, fee percentages of 1.0 per cent for structural, 0.5 per cent for hydraulic and 0.6 per cent for electrical. These are assumptions for the arithmetic, not market rates.

Now change one input. The distributor’s connection offer requires a chamber substation inside the building rather than the kiosk that was assumed, and it has to sit at ground level near the street. Everything else in the illustration is unchanged.

The electrical consultant’s re-design might be a modest variation, perhaps $15,000. The larger numbers sit elsewhere. The chamber consumes roughly 25 square metres of ground floor that was drawn as a retail tenancy. At an assumed $8,000 per square metre of saleable value, that is $200,000 of gross realisation gone. The structural engineer has to provide separate fire-rated enclosure and a heavier slab in that zone, and the architect has to re-plan the ground floor and re-lodge a modification. The engineering variation is 4 per cent of the total; the revenue and re-design consequence is many times that.

The point of the illustration is not the specific numbers, which will differ on every project. It is that the cost of getting engineering input late is almost never the engineering fee. It is the total development cost and revenue consequences of designing around a constraint that was always going to exist.

What happens to the engineers under a design and construct contract?

On many projects the three consultants are engaged by the developer to a point, then novated to the builder, so that the builder takes design responsibility from a defined stage forward. The mechanics and the trade-offs are covered in more depth in the guide to design and construct contracts, but three points bear directly on engineering scope.

The novation point decides who owns the design risk in the gap. Design produced before novation was produced for you. Design produced after was produced for the builder. Where a defect traces back to a pre-novation decision, the argument about who wears it is usually about exactly what was documented at that moment.

Consultants often behave differently after novation. Their client has changed, and their client’s commercial interest is now cost certainty rather than the finished product. Where the developer wants a particular standard maintained, the mechanism is usually the design brief and the contractual requirements, not the consultant relationship.

A separate developer-side reviewer changes the dynamic. Some developers retain an independent structural or services reviewer post-novation precisely so someone is reading the drawings on their behalf. Whether that is worth the fee depends on the project, and it is a decision that sits alongside the broader question of how you resource the development manager and project manager roles.

Where do scope gaps between the three disciplines actually cost money?

Six recurring gaps, drawn from the interfaces described above:

The plant room that nobody allowed for. Fire pump room, hot water plant, main switchroom, communications room. Each needs space, access, ventilation and often acoustic treatment. Any of them appearing after the floor plans are set takes area from something saleable.

Riser and ceiling space. Hydraulic risers, electrical risers and mechanical ducts all want the same shafts, and services in the ceiling void compete with structural depth. Where the floor-to-floor dimension was set before the services were coordinated, something has to give, usually ceiling height.

Penetrations through structure. Every drainage stack and cable tray that passes through a beam or slab is a structural question. Coordinated early it is a sleeve; found on site it is a variation and possibly a remediation.

The substation and its easement. Position, access, structural provision and, sometimes, a registered easement in favour of the distributor. A title outcome that started as a load calculation.

The stormwater handover between civil and hydraulic. Where the legal point of discharge, on-site detention and building drainage meet. Two consultants, one interface, frequently no one written into it.

Fire services split across disciplines. Hydrants and hose reels with hydraulic, sprinklers often with a fire protection specialist, detection and alarm with electrical, fire mode operation with mechanical. Four scopes, one system, and commissioning is where the gaps surface.

The pattern is consistent. The expensive problems are not within any one discipline, they are between them, and the person who has to own the coordination is the developer or the developer’s project manager, not any individual consultant.

What to ask your structural engineer

• What geotechnical information do you need before you can commit to a footing type, and what happens to the design if the borehole results differ from the desktop assumption?
• Does the proposed column grid work for both the basement and the typical floor, or does it require transfer structure? If it does, what is the cost and depth consequence?
• What structural depth are you assuming per floor, and what floor-to-floor dimension does that imply once services and ceiling are allowed for?
• Which slab systems have you considered, and what does each do to programme, depth and cost?
• What does the boundary condition require, and does any part of the shoring or anchoring need a neighbour’s consent?
• Which stages does your fee cover, and specifically is construction-phase inspection, shop drawing review and response to requests for information included or excluded?
• Are you registered in the relevant area of engineering in this jurisdiction, and if this is Victoria, do you hold the building industry endorsement?
• What is your professional indemnity insurance limit, and does it sit at the individual or the company level?

What to ask your hydraulic consultant

• Have you run a flow and pressure test on the street main, and does the result mean the project needs fire water storage and a pump set?
• Where exactly does your scope start and finish relative to the civil engineer’s, on stormwater in particular, and who is responsible for the on-site detention tank?
• Who is designing the sprinkler system, and has the fire water tank been sized for hydrants and sprinklers together?
• What is the confirmed sewer connection point, and is there sufficient fall for gravity drainage or does the project need a pump-out?
• What plant space, riser space and access do your systems need, and has that been marked on the architectural drawings rather than just discussed?
• What backflow prevention does the site require across all services, including fire?
• If this project is all-electric, what changes in your scope, and what does that do to the hot water plant space and load?
• Given hydraulic is not a prescribed area of engineering in most jurisdictions, what are your qualifications, professional credentials and insurance, and can you point to comparable completed projects?

What to ask your electrical engineer

• What maximum demand have you estimated, on what assumptions about electric vehicle charging, all-electric apartments and heat pump hot water?
• Has a connection enquiry been lodged with the distributor, when, and what response time has the distributor indicated?
• Does the connection offer require a substation, and is it a kiosk or a chamber? What area, access, ventilation and fire separation does it need?
• Will the distributor require an easement, and has that been raised with the lawyer handling title?
• What is included in your scope and what sits with a separate specialist: communications, data, security, access control, audiovisual?
• How is emergency power for the fire systems and lifts provided, and what does that plant need?
• How does your design interact with the energy efficiency provisions of the National Construction Code, and who is preparing the energy assessment?
• Are you registered in electrical engineering in this jurisdiction, and does your registration cover the building and construction industry?

A note on what changes and what does not

The engineering itself moves slowly. The physics of a transfer beam and the hydraulics of a hydrant system are the same this year as last. What has been moving fast is the regulatory wrapper around who is allowed to do the work: mandatory registration commenced in Victoria in 2021, New South Wales from 2021 for class 2 and expanded to class 3 and 9c in 2023, the ACT in 2025, Western Australia phasing to full effect in 2027, and South Australia still consulting. Scheme scope, prescribed areas and commencement dates have all changed more than once.

For a developer that means two things. The scope questions above will still be the right questions in five years. The registration answers will not, so the regulator’s own page for the relevant state is the place to confirm the position on the day you engage someone, and the public registers linked above take a minute each to search.

The other durable point is structural rather than regulatory. Engineering fees are typically a small share of a project’s cost, and the decisions those fees inform are among the largest. Engaging the three disciplines early enough to shape the plan, rather than late enough to react to it, is one of the few levers in development that costs almost nothing and moves the outcome a long way. The architect or building designer sets the shape of the project. The engineers determine whether that shape can be built at the cost the feasibility assumed.