Hire a Plumber Southern Highlands NSW 2026 - Costs and Jobs Explained

Hiring a Plumber in the Southern Highlands, Task by Task

Plumbing in the Southern Highlands in 2026 runs from about $165 for a tap repair through to $38,000 for a replacement wastewater treatment system on acreage, and the spread is explained by the property type, not by the tradesperson. The region holds two different plumbing markets, and a village house in Bowral with mains water and council sewer is priced like any serviced town. An acreage property supplying its own water from a tank or bore and treating its own wastewater inside a drinking water catchment is a different trade entirely.

The tasks sort into four groups here, the first being reactive work covering the blocked drain, the burst pipe and the failed hot water unit. System work is the category this region has more of than any other, meaning the pressure pump, the treatment plant, the bore and the tank, all of which you own and maintain. Recurring work is the quarterly wastewater service and the annual backflow test, due whether anything is wrong or not. And diagnostic work covers leak detection and water analysis, which on a property with no meter is the only way to know anything at all.

What Plumbing Costs in the Southern Highlands

Highlands plumbing splits cleanly into two markets that happen to share a postcode, and neither tracks the statewide NSW plumbing rates closely. Village work in Bowral, Mittagong and Moss Vale is priced much like any serviced town, with mains water, council sewer and a plumber ten minutes away. Acreage work is a different trade, because the property supplies its own water, treats its own wastewater and sits at the end of a long driveway.

Village figures are conventional enough, with a business hours call-out including the first hour at $150 to $310 and $95 to $180 an hour afterwards. A leaking tap is $165 to $350, a toilet suite replaced is $460 to $1,040, and a mixer swapped on an existing vanity is $245 to $520. The slightly higher call-out than coastal towns reflects a smaller trade pool, not anything about the work.

Acreage introduces line items that do not exist on a serviced block. A pressure pump supplying the house is $720 to $2,100 to replace and is the component most likely to fail. An aerated wastewater treatment system needs regular servicing at $190 to $420 a visit, which is specialist servicing, not general plumbing work. Bore water often needs treatment for iron or hardness at $2,400 to $8,600 installed. None of these are faults, because they are simply the running cost of supplying your own services.

Travel is a visible charge here, not a hidden one. Many firms nominate a service area around the villages and add $90 to $240 beyond it, and some decline small jobs on outer acreage altogether because an hour of driving for a forty dollar part does not work. Bundling several small jobs into one attendance is worth more in this region than almost anywhere, because you pay the travel once. The figure that surprises people most is onsite wastewater replacement. Because most of the region drains into the Greater Sydney drinking water catchment, the assessment and the system standard are stricter than the equivalent job on the coast, and a replacement runs $18,000 to $38,000 against the $12,000 to $28,000 you might pay elsewhere in the state, and the next two sections explain why that is.

Who Supplies Your Water and Sewer

The Southern Highlands are not a Sydney Water area, which catches out people who have moved down from the city and anyone engaging a Sydney based tradesperson. Water supply and sewerage in the main Wingecarribee villages are run by the local council, and the bulk water behind them comes from the state water authority, not from Sydney Water. For Bowral, Mittagong, Moss Vale, Berrima, Bundanoon and the surrounding villages, Wingecarribee Shire Council is the water and sewer authority. Connection applications, disconnections, meter work, liquid trade waste approvals, backflow device registration and asset information are all council processes with their own forms, fees and timetables. Further west and south around Marulan and Goulburn the relevant council changes again.

The bulk supply comes from the reservoirs and the regional network operated by WaterNSW, which also manages the catchment the water is collected from. That matters less for a dripping tap than it does for anything involving wastewater, because the same organisation that supplies the water has an interest in what goes into the ground upstream of it. Then there is the significant share of properties on no reticulated service at all. Out on acreage the water comes from a tank, a bore or both and the wastewater is treated on site, which means there is no authority to apply to, no meter to read and no main to blame. The flip side is that every component is yours to maintain, and a failure has no utility standing behind it.

The practical step is to establish your position before you need it. Your rates and water notices name the authority. If you receive no water notice at all, you are on tank or bore supply, and if you receive no sewer charge you are on an onsite system. Both facts belong in the first sentence you say to a plumber on the phone.

The Sydney Drinking Water Catchment and Why It Costs You

Most of the Southern Highlands drains into the Greater Sydney drinking water catchment, the collection area feeding the reservoirs that supply Sydney, the Illawarra and the Highlands themselves. Water leaving a Highlands property is upstream of drinking water for several million people, and the planning framework treats it accordingly.

The mechanism is a water quality test applied to development. Where a proposal could affect water quality, it must be assessed for whether it has a neutral or beneficial effect on that quality, meaning the water leaving the site after development must be no worse than before it. For plumbing, this bites hardest on onsite wastewater, because an effluent system is precisely the kind of thing capable of affecting a watercourse. In practice that produces a more demanding pathway than the same job on the coast. The site and soil assessment is more detailed, the land application area is sized more conservatively, buffer distances to watercourses, bores and boundaries are applied more strictly, and the system standard specified is frequently a higher treatment level than a basic septic arrangement. The assessment itself runs $1,400 to $3,600 against the $900 to $2,400 typical elsewhere.

The catchment is managed by WaterNSW, with environmental regulation by the NSW EPA and public health guidance from NSW Health. Approvals for onsite systems are issued by the local council, which applies the catchment considerations as part of its assessment. The result is more parties with an interest and a longer timetable, neither of which is negotiable. The useful way to think about this is as a front loaded cost. Doing the assessment properly and installing a system sized for the actual soil and the actual buffer distances is expensive at the start and uneventful afterwards. Installing something undersized because it was cheaper produces a failure that is both an expense and, in this catchment, a regulatory problem, not a private one.

Onsite Wastewater on Highlands Acreage

A large share of Highlands properties outside the villages treat their wastewater on site, and in this catchment that is the single most consequential plumbing asset on the place. It is also the one most often neglected until it fails, at which point the cost is an order of magnitude higher than the servicing would have been.

Aerated wastewater treatment systems dominate on newer and larger properties because the treatment level suits the catchment requirements. The system aerates and disinfects the effluent so it can be irrigated to a dedicated land application area much like a greywater system, and it depends on a blower, pumps, a disinfection stage and a control panel, all of which are mechanical and all of which fail eventually. Servicing is generally quarterly, with a report, as a condition of the approval to operate. Older properties may still run a conventional septic tank discharging to an absorption trench, which relies on the soil to finish the treatment. These are simpler and cheaper to run, with a pump out every three to five years at $420 to $900, but on reactive clay soil, which is soil that swells when wet and shrinks when dry, the trench performance is poor and in the catchment a replacement is unlikely to be approved as a like for like septic arrangement.

The failure pattern is predictable and almost always traceable to skipped servicing. The blower or the aerator fails quietly, treatment degrades, the disinfection stage stops working, and the first visible symptom is effluent surfacing or odour. By then the land application area may be compromised as well, which turns a $600 service into a $4,500 to $16,000 trench or irrigation area replacement, or a full system replacement at $18,000 to $38,000. The obligations are real, not advisory, because the approval to operate is issued by the council and carries conditions you are required to meet as the owner, environmental obligations sit with the NSW EPA, and effluent leaving your property or entering a watercourse in this catchment is a notifiable problem. An annual service contract at $600 to $1,400 is the cheapest line in this entire guide relative to what it prevents.

Bore Water, Iron and Hardness

A good many Highlands acreage properties draw some or all of their water from a bore, and bore water is not simply rainwater from underground. It has spent time in contact with rock and soil and it carries whatever it dissolved along the way, which in this region commonly means iron, manganese and a degree of hardness. The symptoms are recognisable once you know them. Iron shows as orange or brown staining on basins, baths and laundry, as a metallic taste, and as a slimy build up inside pipework and cisterns. Manganese produces black staining instead of orange, while hardness, meaning dissolved calcium and magnesium, leaves white scale on kettles and shower screens, shortens the life of hot water elements and makes soap difficult to lather.

The first step is always analysis, never equipment. A water test at $180 to $480 establishes what is present and at what concentration, and without it any treatment recommendation is a guess. Treatment then follows the result, never the brochure, so iron and manganese are handled by oxidation and filtration, hardness by a softener, and bacteriological concerns by ultraviolet disinfection. A complete system from a manufacturer such as Davey or Puretec runs $2,400 to $8,600 installed depending on what the analysis demands.

Bore water also attacks the plumbing itself, which is the cost people do not anticipate. Hard water scales the inside of hot water cylinders and burns out elements early, so a cylinder that would last twelve years on mains supply may want replacing at eight. Iron rich water fouls tap seats and cartridges, which is why tap repairs recur more often on bore supply than on reticulated water. Where a property uses both bore and tank or mains, the connection arrangement has to prevent any possibility of bore water entering a drinking water main. That is a backflow prevention requirement, and on a village property with a bore for the garden and mains to the house it is the detail most often done badly. Registration and annual testing where required go to the council, not to Sydney Water.

Tanks, Pumps and Rural Water Lines

On a property not connected to a main, the pressure pump is the heart of the water system and the component most likely to need attention. Understanding what it does and how it fails removes most of the mystery from a category of call-out that otherwise feels random.

The pump itself draws from the tank or bore and maintains pressure in the house pipework, starting when a tap opens and stopping when it closes. Most installations use either a pressure switch with a small vessel or a variable speed controller, and Davey, Onga and Grundfos are the names most commonly fitted on Highlands properties. Service life is eight to fifteen years depending on duty, and replacement runs $720 to $2,100 fitted depending on the type and whether a controller or pressure vessel goes with it. Short cycling is the symptom worth knowing about, because it is routinely misdiagnosed as a dying pump. If the pump starts and stops rapidly in place of running smoothly, the usual causes are a failed pressure vessel that has lost its air charge, or a small leak somewhere on the system bleeding pressure away. Both are far cheaper than a pump, and replacing the pump without checking them means buying a new pump that will also short cycle.

Rural water lines bring their own economics, because a run from a tank or bore to a house, a shed or a line of stock troughs can be hundreds of metres, and at $22 to $48 a metre installed in open ground the pipe is cheap while the trenching is not. Polyethylene in long continuous coils with few joints is the standard for avoiding future bursts here, because every joint on a buried rural run is a future leak you will have to find. Stock troughs and garden lines are where most rural leaks occur, not in the house. A trough float valve that sticks open wastes water continuously and empties a tank, and on a property with no water meter there is no bill to alert you. Checking troughs and isolating unused lines over winter is maintenance that costs nothing and prevents the most common rural water loss there is.

Reactive Clay, Basalt and Cracked Drains

Highlands soils are a mix, and the two that matter for plumbing are the basalt derived clays across much of the plateau and the sandstone influenced profiles toward the escarpment edges. The clays are the problem, because they are reactive, meaning they swell when wet and shrink when dry and move the ground by a measurable amount through the seasons. Rigid pipework buried in reactive clay is loaded every time the moisture content changes. Earthenware drainage, with its short lengths and cement joints, has very little tolerance for that, and the result is cracked pipes and opened joints that appear without any root involvement or any obvious cause. The movement is seasonal, which is why these faults tend to show up after a long dry spell breaks or after an unusually wet winter.

The response is material and jointing, not depth. Polyethylene and PVC with rubber ring joints accommodate movement where cemented earthenware cannot, and where a drain is being replaced in reactive clay the specification should reflect that. Flexible connections at the points where pipework enters a building are equally important, because the house sits on footings that move differently from the surrounding ground. Basalt rock turns up in patches and changes the excavation, not the pipe. Where it is encountered, trenching slows substantially and the rate moves toward rock work, though the Highlands rarely present the continuous shallow shelf that makes the Blue Mountains so expensive to dig. A contractor who carries an allowance for the possibility and says so in the quote is being realistic, not padding the figure.

Hot Water Without Reticulated Gas

Reticulated natural gas reaches parts of the Highlands villages and almost none of the acreage, which narrows the hot water choice before cost is considered. On a rural property the realistic options are electric storage, a heat pump, solar with a boost, or bottled LPG with the cylinder cost that implies. Repair figures are worth exhausting first, and an element and thermostat on electric storage is $310 to $680 fitted. An anode replacement is $360 to $720 and extends cylinder life considerably if done before the rod is consumed, which matters more here because hard bore water shortens cylinder life anyway. A tempering valve, limiting bathroom outlets to fifty degrees, is $310 to $570.

Replacement runs $1,600 to $2,650 for like for like electric storage, $3,400 to $5,300 for a heat pump before rebates, and $4,400 to $8,100 for solar with a boost. LPG continuous flow is $2,100 to $3,800 installed but carries an ongoing bottled gas cost that frequently makes it the dearest option over a decade despite a competitive purchase price. Heat pumps need a cold climate conversation here, as they do at altitude. Efficiency falls as ambient air temperature drops, and Highlands winters produce genuine frosts, so the number to ask for is the output at low ambient temperature, not the headline efficiency figure. The unit also needs its condensate drain run so it cannot freeze and block, which is a siting decision made at installation and expensive to change later.

On a property with hard bore water, treat the water or expect to replace cylinders early. Scale forms on the element and on the tank wall, insulating the element so it runs hotter and fails sooner, and the effect compounds. Where the analysis shows meaningful hardness, a softener ahead of the hot water service is cheaper than replacing cylinders on a short cycle. Rebates on heat pump and solar installations are worth confirming through the NSW Government and should appear as their own line on any quote.

Frost Hollows and Exposed Rural Pipework

The Highlands get hard frosts, and the local geography concentrates them. Cold air sinks, so the valleys and hollows around Bowral, Bundanoon, Exeter and Robertson record lower minimums than the ridges above them, and a property in a hollow can be several degrees colder than one a short drive away on higher ground.

Rural properties are more exposed to this than village houses for a simple structural reason. A village cottage has most of its pipework inside a heated building envelope or buried under a garden. An acreage property has pipework running to sheds, to stock troughs, to a pump shed and to garden taps, much of it above ground or shallowly buried over long distances, and all of it in air that reaches minus four or five on a clear winter night. The components that fail are predictable, and pump sheds are the worst of them, because a pump body full of stationary water in an unheated shed is a casting waiting to crack, and a cracked pump body is a replacement, not a repair. Exposed line to troughs splits, trough float valves freeze, garden taps and their risers split, and hot water relief lines block with ice.

Protection is cheap and it is specific to each item. Lagging exposed runs with closed cell insulation and weatherproof wrap costs $320 to $1,400 across a rural property depending on the length involved. Insulating or enclosing a pump shed, draining and isolating unused lines over winter, and fitting covers to exposed taps are all low cost. Where a long run genuinely cannot be buried or relocated, thermostatic trace heating is the engineered answer and needs an electrician alongside the plumber. The consequence of inaction is worse here than in a house, because nobody is standing next to a trough line when it lets go. Water escapes continuously, and on a property with no meter there is no bill to warn you, so the first sign is an empty tank or a pump that has run itself to destruction trying to maintain pressure against an open line.

Distance, Driveways and Trade Scarcity

The Highlands are a dispersed region with a small resident trade, and both facts show up on invoices. Properties sit well apart, driveways are long, and the number of plumbers available after hours across the whole area is small. None of that is unreasonable, and all of it is manageable if you understand how firms price it.

Most firms nominate a service area around the villages and charge a travel component beyond it, typically $90 to $240. Some decline small jobs on outer acreage altogether, because forty minutes each way for a tap washer does not pay. This produces the common Highlands experience of ringing several plumbers for a minor job and being turned down before someone takes it. The practical response is bundling, and it is worth more here than in any other region covered by this set of guides. If you have a dripping tap, a slow drain, a trough valve to replace and a tank outlet to check, get them done in one attendance. You pay the travel once and the plumber gets a worthwhile booking, which is why you will also get a date sooner.

Long driveways matter in their own right as well, since a gravel driveway of several hundred metres affects access for a service vehicle, and for anything involving excavation it determines whether a machine and a tipper can reach the work. Tell the plumber the driveway length and surface when you call, because it changes both the time allowance and sometimes the vehicle they bring. After-hours coverage deserves planning, not hope, because with a thin out of hours trade and attendance at $300 to $620, the realistic wait on a winter weekend can be substantial. That makes your ability to isolate a problem yourself genuinely valuable, which on a rural property means knowing where the pump isolating switch is, where the tank outlet valve is, and which valve isolates the house from the troughs and sheds.

Blocked Drains in the Highlands

Blocked drains here divide along the same village and acreage line as everything else, and the causes differ enough that the right diagnostic question is which of those two you are. A village drain and an acreage drain present identically at the fixture and have almost nothing else in common. In the villages the pattern is familiar, since Bowral, Mittagong and Moss Vale have older housing with earthenware drainage and a century of deliberate cool climate planting over the top of it, so root intrusion dominates every blocked drain call. Mature exotic deciduous trees, conifers and established hedging all find cement joints, and the fix is relining or replacing the affected length instead of clearing it annually.

The second village cause is soil movement affecting drainage, which the clay section above covers. A camera showing a clean crack or an opened joint with no root mass, on a property where the season has just turned wet or dry, indicates reactive clay, not trees. The distinction changes the replacement specification, because putting rigid earthenware back guarantees a repeat.

The first thing to settle on a rural block is whether you have a drain problem at all. A property on an onsite system has no connection to a sewer main, so soggy ground, odour or slow fixtures may be the treatment system or its land application area, not a blockage. Clearing a drain that is not blocked achieves nothing, and a plumber who asks whether the property is sewered before quoting a drain clearance is doing the first piece of useful diagnosis. Where a village property does have a genuine blockage past the property boundary, it is the council network and therefore the council cost, and reporting it is free. The dividing line is generally the boundary shaft or the connection point. Off the sewer there is no equivalent, because there is no main, which is the trade off for not paying a sewer charge.

Finding Leaks on a Long Run

Leak detection in the Highlands is complicated by two things that do not apply in a serviced suburb. The runs are long, sometimes hundreds of metres between a tank, a pump, a house and a line of troughs, and on tank or bore supply there is no water meter to tell you a leak exists at all.

For village properties on mains water the meter test still does most of the work and costs nothing. Turn off every tap and appliance and watch the dial, and if it keeps creeping, water is escaping past the meter at your expense. Shut the hot water unit off at its own stop tap and read again, because if the movement stops the fault is on the hot side and the search area has just halved. On tank or bore supply you need different indicators, and the most reliable is the pump. A pump that starts when no tap is open is telling you the system is losing pressure somewhere, which is the rural equivalent of a creeping meter dial. A tank level dropping faster than household use explains, a pump running hot, or a pump that cycles through the night all point the same way.

Narrowing it down on a long run is a matter of isolating sections. Most rural systems have, or should have, isolating valves separating the house from the sheds, the garden and the troughs. Closing those one at a time and watching whether the pump settles identifies which branch holds the leak before anyone walks a line looking for wet ground. If your property has no such valves, fitting them at $180 to $520 each is worthwhile for this reason alone. Professional leak detection runs $420 to $1,000 and uses acoustic listening and tracer gas, and on a long rural run tracer gas tends to be the more practical method because it can be introduced into an isolated section and detected where it surfaces. Insist on a marked point, not a general area, because excavating a guess along a three hundred metre run is an expensive way to narrow things down.

Certificates, Warranties and Insurance

Ask for the paperwork while the plumber is on site, since every item is free then and difficult later. In the Highlands there is one document that matters more than anywhere else covered by these guides, which is the approval to operate for an onsite wastewater system and the service records that go with it. Notifiable plumbing and drainage work anywhere in New South Wales requires a certificate of compliance lodged by the licensed plumber who performed it, under the Plumbing and Drainage Act 2011. That certificate is your evidence the work was lawful and compliant, so ask for your copy before the van leaves. The Act and the current regulation are published on the NSW legislation website if you want to read the obligation yourself.

The technical standard is the Plumbing Code of Australia, Volume Three of the National Construction Code from the Australian Building Codes Board, which adopts the AS/NZS 3500 plumbing and drainage series maintained by Standards Australia. For an onsite system, the council approval to operate carries conditions binding on you as the owner, and the quarterly service reports are the evidence you have met them. Statutory warranties under the Home Building Act 1989 run six years from completion for major defects and two years for the remainder. A written contract is required above the contract threshold, and the contractor must take out home building compensation cover for residential work above the insurance threshold and give you the certificate before you pay a deposit. An onsite wastewater replacement at $18,000 to $38,000 is comfortably above that threshold, so there is no version of that job where the certificate is optional.

If the work is defective, put it in writing and give the contractor a genuine chance to rectify. Where that fails, NSW Fair Trading handles complaints and dispute resolution, and a home building dispute that will not settle is heard by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal. Arguments over a payment, finance or an insurance claim connected to the job belong with the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, while consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law are explained by the ACCC.

Licence Classes and Checking an Operator

Licensing here splits into separate categories, so plumbing, draining and gasfitting may be held individually or together, and specialist accreditations for backflow prevention testing and thermostatic mixing valve servicing on top. The right question is whether the person holds the category your job needs, not whether they hold a licence at all.

Verification is free and takes about a minute. The public register maintained by NSW Fair Trading shows the licence number, the categories, the expiry date and any conditions, reachable through Service NSW. Match the licensed name against the trading name on the quote, because a discrepancy there is what undermines a warranty claim when you most need it. This region adds a competence question that licensing does not answer. Servicing an aerated wastewater treatment system, specifying bore water treatment from an analysis, and sizing a pressure pump for a long rural run are all specialised, and a competent village plumber may have done none of them. Asking how many systems of your type they service, or what analysis they want before quoting treatment, sorts this out quickly.

There is also a question about who turns up. Highlands work sometimes draws operators from Sydney or Wollongong, and a tradesperson who will not be in the region in six months is a poor choice for anything carrying a warranty you may need to call on, or for an onsite system needing quarterly attendance. Ask directly whether they are locally based and whether they offer service contracts. Safety obligations apply here as everywhere else, since trench work carries collapse risk, sewer pits and treatment system chambers are confined spaces, and cutting or removing asbestos cement pipe or fibro requires the appropriate licence, all under SafeWork NSW, with waste disposal obligations to the NSW EPA. Before any excavation, underground service locations should be obtained through Before You Dig Australia.

What to Look Out For When Hiring a Southern Highlands Plumber

Highlands plumbing complaints follow a pattern, which is a quote written for a serviced suburban block meeting an acreage property inside a drinking water catchment. The signals are in what a tradesperson fails to establish, not in the figure they arrive at. The first thing to watch is a quote that has not established whether the property is sewered. On a serviced block a drainage complaint is a drain. On acreage the same soggy ground and odour may be the wastewater treatment system or its land application area, and those are different trades with an order of magnitude between them. Anyone quoting a drain clearance without asking has skipped the diagnosis.

The second is bore water treatment quoted without an analysis. Iron, manganese and hardness all produce different problems and need different equipment, and a system specified from a brochure and not from a water test at $180 to $480 is a guess you are paying thousands for. Decline anyone who will quote treatment before testing. The third is an onsite wastewater proposal that makes no mention of the catchment. Most of this region is inside the Greater Sydney drinking water catchment, where the assessment is more demanding, the land application area is sized conservatively and the treatment standard specified is frequently higher. A contractor quoting $14,000 for a replacement system here is either unaware of the catchment requirements or intending to install something that will not be approved.

Beyond those three, the usual checks all hold here too. Quotes with the travel component buried, never stated openly, since it is a genuine cost here and you should be able to see it. A short cycling pressure pump proposed for replacement before the pressure vessel has been checked. Rigid earthenware specified as a like for like replacement in reactive clay. Hot water replacement on hard bore water with no mention of treating the water. And a contractor who will not put in writing who lodges the compliance certificate, which costs almost nothing and is your only proof the work was lawful.

Getting Quotes You Can Actually Compare

Two Highlands quotes are comparable only when both are pricing the same kind of property, and this region contains two quite different kinds. Half an hour establishing your own position before you ring anyone is what makes three figures mean the same thing. Describe the symptom and not your conclusion, meaning what is happening, where, since when, and what changed just before it started, including whether the season has turned wet or dry, because reactive clay movement is seasonal and that detail is genuinely diagnostic here. A plumber told the back lawn is soggy and the house is on a treatment system has been handed a clue. One told the drain needs clearing has been handed an instruction.

Each plumber quoting needs the identical five facts, because every one of them changes the number in this region. The locality, and the driveway length and surface. Whether the property is on the council sewer or an onsite treatment system. Whether the water is mains, tank, bore or a combination, and what year the house was built. And if you are on an onsite system, what type it is and when it was last serviced.

Have the quote laid out so every variable is visible, with labour separated from materials, the travel component stated as its own line and not folded into the call-out, the hourly rate named for work beyond scope, the exclusions listed and the compliance certificate shown as included or excluded. For bore water treatment, the analysis priced separately and the equipment specified from its results. For drainage, the camera inspection and report as their own line.

Finally, be sceptical of the cheapest figure on anything involving wastewater or bore water. On wastewater, the low quote is often the one that has not priced the catchment assessment and the conservative sizing, and it will either rise or fail to gain approval. On bore water, the low quote is usually the one that skipped the analysis. Collect three, read the exclusions before the totals, and ask the cheaper two to account for whatever the dearest one allowed for that they left out.