Building a fence or wall
Adding a fence or wall on your property can sometimes place too much load on our pipes, manholes, meters and other assets, or it might make it hard for us to access them for planned maintenance or in an emergency. That’s why you need to have a building application approved by Icon Water before any work begins.
This information should be read together with the following pages:
Step 1: Find out what's in the ground
We recommend contacting Before You Dig Australia (BYDA). This free service will provide plans showing Icon Water’s assets (as well as assets for telecommunications, electricity, gas and stormwater) in your work area.
Once you’ve located our assets, confirm their location (they might have shifted from what is shown on plans because of past activities, erosion, subsidence or the slope of the land). For step-by-step instructions see How to Locate Icon Water Assets.
You may also want to find out where your own services are on your property (like the pipes that run from your water meter into your house) before you start digging. Ask a plumber, electrician or visit Access Canberra. These internal service lines belong to you and we don’t keep records of them at Icon Water.
Step 2: Work out any restrictions on what you can build
Retaining walls
If your retaining wall will go across our access path you will need to provide a ramp or stairway to allow our machinery and equipment to go over the wall.
You will also need to make sure that footings don’t interfere with our mains below the ground.
Fences
If you are planning to build a lightweight timber or sheet metal fence alongside or across our assets, we only need to be sure that:
- posts are not located directly over the asset
- if we need to access our assets we can reach them safely and without too much disruption to you or your neighbours.
If you’re planning on building a brick or masonry fence:
- we might ask for some more information about your fence footings (especially how deep they are)
- if your fence has a gate, it’s best to locate the gate over any buried pipes. This means if we need to dig up the pipe we can do it without removing your wall, and that there is no load from the wall that might damage the pipe.
If your wall or masonry fence needs to cross the pipe, you will need to build a ‘bridging beam’ to support the wall over the pipe.
We strongly advise you to engage a suitably qualified and experienced professional to design your walls and footings.
Step 3: Prepare and submit an Icon Water building application
Once you have decided on the details of your proposed construction we recommend engaging a professional to develop a design and engineering drawings and submit them to us with an application for approval.
See What makes a good building plan (you can also submit your application from this page) for more information.
Following these steps will help your project run smoothly.
We’re always happy to help
For general queries, you can contact us directly at talktous@iconwater.com.au. Our team will do their best to respond within 24 hours.
If you need a bit more assistance, or just prefer talking to a person, you can call us on 02 6248 3111 (select option 3).