Plumbing Questions

(1) Is black Alkathene pipe still used today for supply cold water to houses.
(2) Take a present situation where there are 3 units in line one behind the other. At present they share a single water meter. If a new pipe was run from the road (about 35 m. away) and each unit had its own meter installed, would some sort of planning permission be needed.
Anyone prepared to hazard a guess at the cost of such an installation.

Yes alkythene is still used but Plumbers tend to use Blue Brute pipe which is a thicker bore pipe and a lot stronger.
You done need any concents or anything along those lines to install a new water main. You could just have one line with a couple of Tees coming off for each unit

Cheapest way is if you dig tge trench yourself and tge plumber just lays the pipe and does the joins. Otherwise you could use a ditcheitch trencher. Some plumbing firms have them. I would expect it to be around $1000. Main cost being labour.

emz24. Many many thanks for that info Just what I was looking for. Just one thing, what would each meter cost!

Im unsure. Its usually around $200 for a 50 metre coil of 20mm Blue Brute but you might want to go to 25mm if its doing 3 flats. Unsure of exact cost sorry

Half of this is wrong and the other half is a complete guess. If you dont know, you shouldn,t just make stuff up.

Blue Brute is an old form of PVC which is rubbish and gives trouble from the day of installation.
What you want is MDPE which is the modern equivilant of the old HDPE. This is the smaller diameter flexible polyethylene pipe you need. If there is a meter at the boundary now, it most likely belongs to the local Council and you or your plumber cannot legally touch it. You can get a seperate meter to each flat but this must be done through your Council and will cost alot more than $1000 as suggested above. If you simply want to know how much each flat uses for splitting cost, you can install seperate meters after the initial Council meter, and just leave the Council one there. I would advise using 25mm (ID) MDPE, which will be labelled as 32mm OD MDPE for three flats, with 20mm (ID) MDPE for the laterals into each flat, which will be labelled 25mm OD MDPE. The MDPE (which is blue) is measured and identified by its outside diameter, where the old HDPE (black) is measured by the internal diameter. The meters used here are around $150 for a manifold and another $150 for the meter itself to go on this.Then you have fittings, meter boxes, pipe labour, reinstatement of gardens/paths/lawns, finding where the flats are individually fed now (possibly into the first flat, then all through the roof space to the next ones (how do you install meters then!) etc. etc.