Under a normal suburban block there is gas, water, electricity, telecommunications, and often a few things nobody has a record of. None of it is where people assume, some of it is far shallower than people assume, and the service that tells you where it is costs nothing.
What Before You Dig Australia is
Before You Dig Australia — BYDA, previously known as Dial Before You Dig — is a free national referral service. You lodge one request describing where you intend to dig, and BYDA passes it to every registered asset owner with infrastructure near that location. Each of them sends you their plans.
You lodge it through the BYDA portal, or by calling 1100. Plans commonly come back within minutes, though BYDA advises allowing up to two business days, so it is worth lodging when you book the job rather than the night before.
It costs nothing. There is no version of this where skipping it makes sense.
Yes, this applies to homeowners
The common assumption is that BYDA is a commercial construction formality. It is not — BYDA publishes guidance specifically for homeowners, and the jobs that hit services are rarely the big ones.
The usual offenders are small and domestic:
- Fence posts, especially along a front boundary where the gas and water services cross.
- Star pickets and pegs driven in for formwork or a garden bed.
- Planting a tree, which is how a surprising number of telecommunications cables die.
- Digging out a stump, where the roots have grown around a service.
- A post hole for a clothesline, letterbox or pergola.
Telecommunications and gas connections can run considerably shallower than people expect, particularly on older properties and anywhere the ground level has been changed since the service was laid.
What the plans actually tell you
This is the part that catches people out, and it matters more than anything else here.
The plans show approximate locations
They are a starting point, not a survey. Depth is frequently not stated and is frequently wrong when it is, because ground levels change. A line drawn on a plan tells you a service is somewhere in that vicinity — it does not tell you it is exactly there.
Anything near a marked service still has to be located on site before a machine bucket goes near it: hand digging a pothole to expose it, or vacuum excavation on bigger jobs. The plans tell you where to be careful. They do not tell you it is safe to dig.
What is not on the plans at all
BYDA covers registered asset owners. It does not cover anything privately installed on your side of the meter and never recorded anywhere, which on an older property can be a lot:
- Power run out to a shed, a studio or a pool pump by a previous owner.
- Irrigation, garden lighting and pool plumbing.
- Old septic connections and abandoned tanks, common on properties out towards Sunbury, Mickleham and Kalkallo.
- Private water lines to a tank or a stock trough.
- Earlier drainage that was installed, forgotten, and is now in the way.
Nobody has a map of these. What substitutes for one is knowing the property — if you have lived there twenty years, what you remember is genuinely useful information and worth mentioning before we start. Beyond that, it is a careful first pass with the machine and paying attention to what the ground looks like.
How to lodge one
Go to the BYDA portal, or call 1100
Free either way. The online form is quicker.
Describe the dig area generously
Draw a boundary that covers everywhere you might dig, not the exact trench line. A request that only covers half the work is not much use.
Give a realistic start date
Plans have a validity period. Lodging six months early means lodging again.
Read what comes back
Each asset owner replies separately, and the responses arrive in different formats with different notes. Some include specific requirements about how close a machine may work to their asset. Those are not suggestions.
Locate before you dig
Pothole by hand near anything marked. This is the step that actually prevents the damage.
Who pays when something gets hit
Broadly, whoever was doing the digging. A struck telecommunications cable is expensive and inconvenient. A struck gas main is expensive, dangerous, and brings an emergency response, a street closure and a conversation with people who will want to know what plans you held.
Set against that, a free request and half an hour of hand digging is not a difficult trade. We lodge a BYDA request on every job that breaks ground — whether it is a drainage trench or a block being cleared — and locate by hand near anything marked. It is not caution for its own sake. It is the cheapest insurance available.
Details of the BYDA service, including current response times and portal links, are on byda.com.au. Processes change; check the source before relying on anything here.