Three Applications, and Four Places You Might Discharge To
The City of Whitehorse — formed on 15 December 1994 by merging the City of Box Hill with the City of Nunawading, and headquartered in this suburb ever since — handles the private-to-public handover more formally than its neighbours. Where other councils publish a definition, Whitehorse publishes a product: the Stormwater Legal Point of Discharge Report, obtained through a sequence of three separate applications.
1️⃣ Stormwater Report Application
Identifies the connection point for the property, and says whether drainage plans from a certified engineer will be needed. Council is careful to add that this stage buys information alone and authorises no works at all. Knowledge, not permission.
2️⃣ Drainage or Civil Plan Application
Where the design itself is lodged and assessed. On anything beyond a simple house connection, this is the stage a certified engineer becomes involved.
3️⃣ Drainage Permit Application
Council calls this the permission to "start digging". Until it is issued, nothing goes in the ground, whatever the report from stage one said.
Whitehorse then sets out four possible destinations for that discharge, and on an older Nunawading block the answer is regularly not the street frontage. They are, in the Council's own ordering: the Council road, taking in footpath and naturestrip; a Council easement at the rear or side of the property; a Council reserve or park; or an arterial road managed by VicRoads, again including its footpath and naturestrip. Whitehorse Road is an arterial, so a good many properties along the highway fall into that last category rather than the first.
Rear and side easements matter enormously in a suburb subdivided as heavily as this one, and the Council's guidance on them contains a detail most owners miss. An easement is land set aside for drainage, and building over one or laying a drain within it requires a Council permit, with limits on what may be planted or constructed there. The catch is that not every drainage easement actually contains a drain. Having one on your title tells you what the land is reserved for, not what is buried in it, and the only reliable way to settle that is to go and look. See pipe locating.
Council is candid about the network's origins too. Not every older subdivision was connected to the Council drainage system at the time it was laid out, and where drains are put in later, Council then assumes responsibility for maintaining and repairing them. Across the municipality that network now runs to 836 kilometres of stormwater drainage assets, and $1.6m went into renewal and upgrade works in 2022/23.
On the wastewater side there is no ambiguity at all. Whitehorse puts water supply and waste water with Yarra Valley Water across the whole municipality and directs residents to its offices in Mitcham, one suburb east. Faults go to 13 27 62.
Renting in Nunawading? Repairing drainage is generally the owner's cost, since the pipework is part of the building, with the exception of damage caused by something that plainly should not have been put down it. Report it in writing so the request is dated, take photographs before anything is moved, and ask for the inspection footage afterwards. Our guide to who is responsible for a blocked drain covers the edge cases.
Looking for a Drain Plumber in Nunawading? Drains Are All We Do
Most people searching for a plumber in Nunawading are chasing a drain that has stopped taking water, and drainage is the entire business. Blocked drains and blocked sewers, blocked toilets, sinks, showers and basins, stormwater pits and downpipe lines, root cutting, jetting, camera work, pipe locating and relining. There is no second trade competing for the week.
That narrowness is the point rather than a limitation. Working in drains every day is why a Nunawading fault gets read faster: which access opening on an older block is worth using, whether the screen is showing settlement or a soft build-up, and which tool the pipe can actually take. If what you need is not drainage, you will be told during the call rather than after a van has turned up. See blocked drains and emergency blocked drains.
How Far Does the Problem Go? A One-Minute Test
This is the single most useful thing you can do before phoning anyone, and it takes less time than the call itself. Work through the following in order and note what you find.
- Run the kitchen sink for thirty seconds and watch it empty. Slow and gurgling, or away cleanly?
- Flush the toilet, then immediately look at the nearest shower or floor waste. If the water level there moves, the fault is downstream of both, not in either.
- Run the laundry trough and check the toilet. Same principle, opposite end of the house.
- Count how many fixtures misbehaved. One means a local branch. Two or more means the shared line they all discharge into.
- Go outside and find the grated fitting nearest the building. If there is water in it or around it, the main line is involved and the situation is urgent.
- In a unit or townhouse, ask a neighbour. If theirs is doing it too, this is a shared drainage matter and worth filming before anyone starts apportioning blame.
Report the result of that test when you call and the right equipment comes off the van first time.
Helpful, and Actively Unhelpful
Wastewater coming up inside a building is an emergency at any hour, and the 24/7 line exists precisely for it. Ring 0425 226 636.
What Changes Through the Nunawading Year
March to May is when leaf and grit load up gutters and surface pits. It is also the cheapest possible time to deal with them, because an hour spent emptying pits in autumn buys a dry winter and an hour spent in July generally buys a repair bill instead.
June to August is the honest test of a stormwater line, because sustained rain uses up whatever spare capacity a half-restricted pipe had been quietly getting away with. In a headwater suburb the run-off is generated locally and quickly, so it is the private outlet that fails first rather than the creek.
September to November brings a rise in underground root activity. A sewer cleared in winter without addressing the opening that let material in will very often close over again in spring, in the same metre of pipe as before.
December to February is when short violent storm cells matter, since ground baked hard sheds rain straight into the pit network rather than absorbing any of it. Kitchen waste lines also narrow faster in warm weather, as fat that goes down as liquid sets harder against the pipe wall.
Signals That a Nunawading Drain Is Restricted
- Noise moving between fixtures — flush one thing and hear another respond. The physics is explained in why is my drain gurgling.
- Water standing in one spot long after the rain stops — on filled or settled ground, that often means fall rather than blockage.
- An outdoor gully overflowing — the overflow relief gully doing exactly what it was installed for. Treat it as urgent.
- Damp at the bottom of an external wall after storms — usually a stormwater outlet that is no longer taking the roof load.
- Odour that changes with wind and weather — see why does my drain smell.
- The same blockage returning at roughly the same time each year — a defect keeping a schedule, not coincidence.
- A kitchen sink that has grown slower over several years — see kitchen sink draining slowly.
- Lawn or paving that has visibly sunk in a line — worth a camera, because that line may be the pipe.
Our Method on a Nunawading Job
- Work out which system, and where it can be entered. Rainwater or wastewater, a single branch or the pipe everything shares, and which opening gives the best run at it. On older or redeveloped ground that stage often means tracing the line before touching it.
- Send the camera in first where it matters. On any shared or repeat-offending line, knowing what is in there beats guessing, and it prevents the wrong tool being used on a pipe that cannot take it.
- Clear it with equipment matched to the material. Soft, local build-up comes out on a drain machine. Roots, silt, scale and set grease want jetting at 5000 PSI, where a rotating head is drawn back along the line and strips the wall clean rather than boring a channel through the middle.
- Film the cleared length again. With the water moving, the barrel can be read properly, and defects that were hidden under debris become visible. The recording is yours.
- Explain what it showed, including when to do nothing. A fracture, a lifted joint, a belly holding water, a connection somebody made badly decades ago. Sometimes the right answer is to monitor it. You get told that too.
Clearing It Again, or Relining It Once
A pipe that has needed clearing twice in the same place is telling you something. The material that got in is the consequence; the opening that admitted it is the cause, and clearing does nothing about openings.
Relining addresses that directly. A liner saturated in resin is pulled through the damaged length, inflated hard against the host pipe and cured, so a series of jointed sections becomes a single unbroken internal wall with no gaps to exploit. It is done through existing access, so the driveway, the paved courtyard or the established garden above stays where it is.
It is not universal. Where a run has actually collapsed, been crushed, or lost so much fall that water will not travel at all, replacement is the honest answer and you will hear that rather than a sales pitch for a liner. The footage decides. See pipe relining and relining versus replacement.
Jobs We Take On Around Nunawading
🌧️ Stormwater that has stopped taking water
Pits packed with silt, downpipe lines choked at the first change of direction, outlets under paving nobody has seen in twenty years. In a headwater suburb it is the private outlet that gives way first. See stormwater drains.
🚽 Toilets
Sometimes genuinely local to the pan and its branch, and sometimes the pan is just the first fixture to notice a stoppage further along. Watch the shower when you flush and you will know which. See blocked toilets.
🪣 Sinks, basins and troughs
Warm fat leaves the sink as liquid and arrives at the pipe wall as a solid, closing the branch a fraction at a time until one big wash-up finishes it. See blocked sinks and blocked basins.
🌳 Sewer lines
The whole-property version, since every fixture ends up sharing one pipe. Roots through a failed joint is the standard finding on the older streets. Jetting and a camera, not a plunger. See blocked sewers.
🏬 Retail, warehouse and workshop drains
Big roofs, big car parks and trade waste along the MegaMile and the Rooks Road precinct. Scheduled clearing beats an unplanned closure every time. See commercial drains.
🚨 After-hours callouts
Wastewater indoors, everything stopped at once, or a storm putting water somewhere it has never been. Nunawading is covered around the clock for those. See emergency blocked drains.
Drain Services in Nunawading 3131
- Blocked drains — attended the same day wherever the run allows
- Clogged drains — same job, whichever word you searched for
- Stormwater drains — pits, downpipe runs, outlets and surface flow
- Stormwater health check — the autumn job that saves the winter one
- Blocked sewers — whole-property stoppages, cleared and recorded
- CCTV drain inspection — bellies, fractures and joints identified on screen
- Hydro jet drain cleaning — 5000 PSI, wall scoured, diameter returned
- Blocked toilets, blocked sinks, blocked showers and blocked basins
- Pipe locating — before you dig near an easement, not after
- Pipe relining — no-dig repair on settled and filled ground
- Drain smoke testing — for leaks and odours that will not show any other way
- Pre-slab pour CCTV — before the concrete goes over it on a townhouse site
- Pre-purchase drain testing — inspect the drains before settlement
- Overflow relief gullies — the outdoor fitting that keeps a surcharge outside the house
- 24/7 emergency blocked drains — any hour, every day of the week
- Commercial drains — retail, industrial and body corporate work
The Council's Own Address Floods — What the 2014 Study Found
If you want one piece of evidence that drainage in this suburb deserves attention, it is not a resident complaint or an anecdote from a wet winter. It is a flood study the Council itself commissioned, on the Council's own land.
The site is 379-399 Whitehorse Road, Nunawading, which is the Whitehorse Civic Centre address. The study was prepared by Irwinconsult and dated 11 September 2014, and its opening finding is unambiguous: "The development site lies within an area known to be flooded from overland stormwater flows from the surrounding catchment."
The detail is what makes it useful. The report found that the minor pipe system surcharges in a 10% AEP event — that is, a storm with a one in ten chance of happening in any given year, which is not a rare weather event by any measure. In a 1% AEP event, water on the site reaches 126.5 metres AHD, which the study notes is 200 millimetres above the existing floor level. Two hundred millimetres of water over the floor of a civic building, in a suburb nobody thinks of as flood-prone.
Two further numbers set the scale. The contributing catchment is "approximately 22 hectares", drawing from Whitehorse Road, the Nunawading football oval and residential land to the west. And "There is an 800mm diameter trunk drain that passes through the centre of the site."
There is a second thing worth noticing here. Whitehorse does not publish a design storm standard for its drainage network, which sets it apart from neighbouring councils that state an ARI or AEP figure openly. Yet a study commissioned on its own site used both a 10% and a 1% AEP scenario, and reported the results. The information exists; it is simply produced project by project rather than published as a municipal standard. For a property owner the takeaway is practical rather than political: you cannot look up how much storm your street pipe was designed to carry, so the sensible investment is in keeping the section you own running at its full diameter.
Nunawading Is a Headwater, Not a Floodplain
The Whitehorse Integrated Water Management Strategy is explicit about where this suburb sits in the drainage hierarchy. It names Nunawading, Blackburn and Forest Hill as the headwaters for Kooyong Koot — Gardiners Creek — which then flows through Box Hill and Burwood. Separately, Koonung Creek originates in Nunawading, near Springvale Road.
Two creeks start here. Neither of them arrives here. That single fact governs how the suburb behaves in a storm, and it is why the flood risk profile looks so different from what people expect of an established suburb on a highway.
VICSES makes the same point about the municipality generally: because every significant watercourse in Whitehorse is still in its upper catchment, levels rise fast once heavy rain sets in. The Council's own summary is shorter still — "Flooding in the City of Whitehorse is usually flash flooding." Three dated events sit behind those statements at municipal level, in December 2003, December 2007 and February 2011, though none of them is specific to this suburb.
Now the honest part, because a suburb page that only tells you about danger is not much use. VICSES does not name a single Nunawading road as likely to flood, and Nunawading does not appear on its list of Whitehorse suburbs most likely to be impacted. Forest Hill, which shares the 3131 postcode, does appear on that list, and three of its roads are named: Faulkner Street, Forest Road and Sandra Street.
So what does that leave? Overland flow and pipe surcharge. Water arriving across the ground surface rather than up a creek, and water pushing back out of a pipe network that has momentarily filled. The 2014 civic centre study is a textbook description of exactly those two mechanisms operating together, and they are the ones that put water against a Nunawading house.
Brickworks, Clay Pits and Ground That Was Filled In
Nunawading made bricks and pottery. That is not decorative local history on a drainage page, because making bricks means digging holes, and the holes were later filled in and built over. Two of them are documented well enough to name the streets.
The Metropolitan Steam Brick Co. worked an 80-acre site on the western side of Rooks Road from about 1884. The company was wound up in June 1894, but the excavation stayed: "The clay pit remained on the site and was later filled with water until it was filled in with soil in 1963 and the site was redeveloped into small businesses." A water-filled pit, backfilled with soil, then covered in commercial buildings.
Separately, the Geal Bros. Pottery quarry at 264–272 Springvale Road, on the corner of Milton Street, was sold to A.V. Jennings in 1973. Between 1973 and 1981 the brickworks were demolished and the quarry was filled in; a retirement village occupies the ground today.
A third site is still in transition. The Daniel Robertson Brick Works at 56–74 Station Street was bought by Valentine Robertson for £8,000 in 1929 and kept operating until November 2013. Redevelopment as 173 townhouses and 180 apartments began construction in 2023.
None of which means every Nunawading property is sitting on fill. Most are not. But when a drain in this suburb blocks repeatedly in the same spot and the cause is never obvious, the ground beneath it is a line of enquiry worth taking seriously, and the address history is often the fastest clue.
It Was Called Tunstall Until 1945
Search old records for this suburb and you will not find it under its present name. Until 1945 it was Tunstall, after Tunstall in Staffordshire, a town famed for its potteries — an apt borrowing, since brick and clay products were being produced here from the 1870s. Tunstall station opened in 1886.
The population figures show how small it stayed for a long time: 688 people in 1921 and 728 in 1933. The City of Nunawading was proclaimed on 12 April 1945, and from there growth was extraordinary — 10,774 residents in 1947 rising to 100,300 by 1981. The municipality was then folded into Whitehorse in 1994.
Modern infrastructure has kept rearranging things. The old station closed on 18 December 2009, and a replacement in a 1.5 kilometre cutting west of Springvale Road opened on 11 January 2010, at a cost of $140 million. Worth being precise about that, since the level crossing removals at Blackburn Road in 2017 and at Rooks Road and Mitcham Road in 2014 belong to other suburbs and other years.
Every one of those phases left pipework behind it. A suburb that went from a few hundred people to six figures inside four decades did not receive one coherent generation of drainage. It received several, laid to whatever the standard of the day was, connected into whatever was already in the ground, and then built over. Two houses in the same Nunawading street can differ by decades in material, depth and where the inspection opening sits, which is why the camera goes in before any decision gets made.
The MegaMile, Rooks Road and Commercial Drainage
Council describes the MegaMile as running 3 kilometres along Whitehorse Road, between the Blackburn and Mitcham pedestrian bridges. Victorian Places calls this stretch "metropolitan Melbourne's biggest bulky-goods retail strip". The Nunawading MegaMile and Mitcham Structure Plan was adopted on 21 April 2008, and the MegaMile Precinct Group was incorporated in July 2025. Rooks Road is separately identified as one of the significant industrial precincts in Whitehorse.
Commercial drainage is a different animal from residential, and this suburb has a lot of it. Large roof areas and wide car parks generate volume fast, so the first weak point in a retail stormwater system is usually a silted pit or a partly blocked outlet that copes with drizzle and fails in a downpour. Food premises add grease to short runs. Industrial and workshop sites add solids and sediment that no domestic-scale approach will shift.
The practical difference is scheduling. A house can wait for a symptom; a trading business cannot. Booked maintenance jetting between wet seasons keeps a car park draining and a kitchen open, and it costs a great deal less in disruption than closing the doors on a Friday night. See commercial drains and the stormwater health check.
Residentially the suburb is being pushed the same direction. The 2021 Census recorded a population of 12,413, a median age of 39, and an average of 2.6 people per household. Under the Plan for Victoria, Nunawading and Mitcham are identified as Activity Centres – Housing Choice and Station, and the Nunawading, Blackburn and Mitcham stations together form the Nunawading Cluster, among the first 25 locations named under the Train and Tram Zone Activity Centres programme. More dwellings on the same land means more roof, more paving and more fixtures feeding pipes that were sized for fewer of each.
Frequently Asked Questions — Nunawading
Blocked Drains in Suburbs Near Nunawading
The immediate neighbours are Donvale to the north, Mitcham to the east, Forest Hill to the south and Blackburn to the west, and every one of them shares this suburb's council, its terminology and its water retailer. Downstream, water leaving these headwaters passes through Box Hill on its way toward Kooyongkoot.
Further out the rules start to change. Glen Waverley sits under Monash with different vocabulary and a published storm threshold, while Park Orchards and Warrandyte fall under Manningham on far steeper ground. It is all one service area for us, but it is not one rulebook.
Need a plumber in Nunawading today?
Describe it over the phone at no charge, get a same-day slot where one is available, and reach a real person after hours when it cannot wait. One plumber, start to finish.
📞 Call Jack — 0425 226 636Sources for the local information on this page: Irwinconsult flood study of 379-399 Whitehorse Road, Nunawading, dated 11 September 2014, for the overland flow finding, the 10% AEP surcharge, the 1% AEP level of 126.5 metres AHD relative to floor level, the approximately 22 hectare contributing catchment and the 800mm trunk drain crossing the site; City of Whitehorse drainage guidance for the Stormwater Legal Point of Discharge Report and its three applications, the four possible discharge destinations, the easement guidance, the position on unconnected older subdivisions, the 836 kilometre asset total and the 2022/23 renewal spend, the published contact numbers, and the allocation of water supply and waste water to Yarra Valley Water; Whitehorse Integrated Water Management Strategy adopted 12 September 2022 for the headwater status of Nunawading, Blackburn and Forest Hill within the Kooyong Koot catchment; VICSES Whitehorse local flood guidance for the upper-catchment description, the absence of any named Nunawading road, and the Forest Hill roads and suburb listing; City of Whitehorse and Victorian Places for the MegaMile description and the bulky-goods retail characterisation, the Nunawading MegaMile and Mitcham Structure Plan adopted 21 April 2008, the Rooks Road industrial precinct, the Tunstall name and its Staffordshire origin, Tunstall station in 1886, brick and clay production from the 1870s, the proclamation of the City of Nunawading on 12 April 1945, the amalgamation into Whitehorse on 15 December 1994, and the population figures; local history records for the Metropolitan Steam Brick Co. site on Rooks Road and its filling in 1963, the Geal Bros. Pottery quarry at 264-272 Springvale Road and its filling between 1973 and 1981, and the Daniel Robertson Brick Works at 56-74 Station Street; Victorian Government records for the Springvale Road station relocation of January 2010; and ABS 2021 Census plus the Plan for Victoria activity centre designations for the population, household and planning figures.