Permeable concrete in Victoria

Roots first

Start with a bus stop. On Racecourse Road in Mornington, VicRoads needed a hardstand pad, and the site had a mature tree standing right where the works had to go. We poured a Permcon surface over an open aggregate base inside that tree's protection zone, and the roots under the finished pavement still get air and water through it, the way they would through open ground. It's a small job by area.

Where it's made

The mix is batched with Boral Concrete. Aggregate size is one of the few things that changes by state. Victoria gets 7 mm stone. Everywhere else in the country gets 10 mm.

Clay, and what sits under the slab

A lot of Melbourne is built on clay, and clay lets water through slowly. On sites like that, the base does more of the work than the slab does. The surface itself passes 8,000 to 10,000 mm/hr, but what happens next depends on a bed of clean screenings underneath, which stores the water and releases it into the ground at whatever rate the clay allows, or through an under-drain where the clay won't take it at all. A difficult site gets worked through with the client, not turned away. A hard site changes the base design. It doesn't rule the job out. The technical page has the profiles.

The volume job

Most of what we pour in Victoria by area is one detail: the shared driveway used across Victorian Government housing, delivered through seven of the eleven builders on the state's housing panel, around 750 homes every year. It's a standardised detail that panel builders build into their own site plans, block after block. Elsewhere the work is more varied: a 2,200 m² car park with 160 spaces at a Mornington Peninsula hot-springs development, poured as one surface that drains where it lands rather than toward a single grate; council footpaths and shared paths; and single driveways. Permeable concrete work in Victoria runs from that scale down to a single suburban crossover. Metro jobs have their own considerations, covered on the Melbourne page.

The planning side

BlueFactor has replaced STORM as the tool used to assess stormwater on smaller Victorian sites, and we're happy to talk a designer through how a permeable surface reads inside it. Clause 55 guidance names driveways and paths among the surfaces that can count toward the 20 per cent of a site meant to let water reach deep soil, provided they're built pervious. A Permcon driveway sits in both categories at once: it carries the car, and it carries part of the stormwater answer on the same drawing.

What happens when you call

Give us the address and a rough area, plus a drainage plan if there is one. The Victorian estimator who calls back will want to see the site in person: fall and levels, and what the ground will actually accept. That last one decides how deep the base goes and whether it needs an under-drain. Truck access gets checked, because a tight site slows a pour down. We also check council requirements, so the finished job matches what's on the drawing. What you get back afterwards is a number tied to that site, with base and finish spelled out beneath it.

Send us the details and the Mitcham team will call you back.