A screenshot of the tool itself. The findings are made up; the rules behind them are not.
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Made for architects, by architects. Plumbline reads your Revit model and tells you where it does not meet the National Construction Code: room by room, door by door, stair by stair. Then it shows you each one in the model, and closes the ones a parameter can close.
It is a review aid, not a compliance certificate. It cannot approve a design, and a clean report is not evidence of anything. Read what that means →
A model that cannot answer a question is not a model that passes it. Plumbline says so out loud, and a run full of Inconclusive tells you something worth knowing early: this model is not yet modelled to a standard anyone can check.
The model says the threshold is not met. A number you can take to the drawing and argue with.
The model cannot answer. A door family with no width parameter, a railing type with no readable height, glass whose grade lives in a schedule. Never a silent pass.
The model says it is met, within the limits of the approximation, which is stated on every finding rather than buried in a manual.
NCC Volumes One, Two and Three, AS 1428.1, Livable Housing, AS 1657, and your state. A pack belonging to another jurisdiction stays hidden, so a Victorian variation can never run on a Queensland job.
The state, climate zone and wind region come from the project location in the model, read against the Building Codes Board’s and Geoscience Australia’s published maps. Whether a site is cyclonic or alpine decides whether whole provisions apply, so rules that have nothing to do with your project never appear.
NCC 2025 reaches each state on its own date — Victoria and Tasmania already, New South Wales and Queensland in May 2027. The tool knows them all, and says plainly when your project is somewhere the Code has moved past the rule packs.
Fourteen doors failing a width are usually two door types. Findings are grouped by the change that closes them, biggest first, each showing how much it closes beside how many other elements move with it — so a four-storey office reads as nineteen lines rather than eight hundred rows.
Progress rule by rule, with a cancel that keeps what it has already found. No frozen Revit, no wondering whether it hung.
Jump to any element, or paint every finding into the active view, red for a fail, amber for inconclusive. It is a view override, so one click puts it back.
Sill heights, door widths, railing heights. Every change previewed with the count of other elements it moves, and the whole batch is a single undo in Revit.
Widening a corridor means moving a wall, and that is your decision. Plumbline takes you to each one in turn, states the shortfall in millimetres, then gets out of the way.
Nothing is marked closed because a value was written. It measures again and reports the difference: six resolved, one reopened, two new.
Fire resistance, energy, structure, fire services — most of what a model cannot settle belongs to another consultant. Export that area, they fill in what settles each item, and importing the reply closes them with their name against each one.
What was already failing is not what this revision changed. Measure the check against the run you did for DA or tender and the two are separated.
Door width is a type property. Change it on one door and every door of that type moves with it, including the ones that already comply. Plumbline counts them, says so, and leaves that row unticked until you decide.
It will never move a wall, re-tread a stair or re-grade a ramp. Those are design decisions with consequences the tool cannot see.
Every closure is attributed. The tool claims only the changes it can prove it made. Anything else that closed is recorded as yours.
And a finding that vanished because someone deleted the door is recorded as deleted, never as fixed. Exportable as CSV or a standalone report.
A pack holds thresholds and clause references, filled in - every threshold read out of NCC 2022 and traced to a number its clause states - so there is nothing to type in before the first run. Every finding names the threshold it used and the clause it came from, and any pack can be exported to plain JSON and edited from the Rule Packs button. So when an edition changes, or your certifier reads a clause differently from the last one, the person who adjusts the number is not a developer.
Each pack is a jurisdiction of its own, so a Victorian variation can never run on a Queensland job, and a state schedule is never quietly merged into the national clause it amends. Corrections arrive without reinstalling, and a pack you have edited is left alone when they do.
{ "id": "V1-DOOR-ACCESSIBLE-850", "check": "door.clearWidth", "clauseRef": "AS 1428.1, doorways (verify)", "severity": "Critical", "params": { "minClearWidthMm": 850, "clearWidthDeductionMm": 55 } }
Each one states its own limit on every finding it produces. A corridor width estimated from area and perimeter says so, on the row, every time.
Measured is not the same as covered. Fire resistance, egress, energy, structure and acoustics are all in the rule packs - as requirements raised for you to confirm, each naming the document that settles it. They are not measured, because a fire resistance level is a property of a tested system and a model carries no such thing. The exception is a Performance Solution, which satisfies a requirement by a route no threshold engine can follow; the tool does not pretend to check those.
The ABCB publishes its Deemed-to-Satisfy tables as Excel workbooks. Each one means exporting a schedule, typing numbers in by hand, and doing it again after every revision. All six now run against your model instead, using the areas, rooms, windows and location it already holds.
The tables come out of the Board’s files, not off a keyboard. The sanitary ratios live in that workbook as formulas rather than numbers, so they were extracted and then replayed against the spreadsheet’s own arithmetic at every occupancy from nobody to two thousand people. They ship only where the two agree.
All five NCC 2022 documents were read clause by clause — 2,671 of them, Amendment 1 included. Of those, 265 became a measurement your model can settle and 1,102 became an item raised for you to confirm. Nothing was skipped: a clause with nothing to check carries a recorded reason.
Counted from the same rule files the add-in loads and republished with every build: coverage.json. 27 of the 41 built measurements have a rule pointed at them today; the rest are waiting on a clause review, and everything they would cover is raised for confirmation in the meantime.
Every rule pack, every update, and the state variations, on every tier. No tier withholds a check you need to do your job — what you pay for is that it remembers your projects.
Pricing is not live yet. Plumbline is in early release and nothing is being charged. These are the numbers it will launch at, published now so nobody is surprised later. Join the waitlist and you will hear before they take effect.
Plumbline is in early release. Put your name down and I will write when it is ready for your projects — and not otherwise.
A design-review aid for Revit. Built in Australia by Harfred Labs.
Plumbline is an aid to design review, not a compliance certificate. It cannot approve a design, and a report with no failures is not evidence of compliance. Every finding, including passes, needs confirmation by a registered building surveyor or certifier against the Code edition in force.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by the ABCB. Does not include or reproduce the NCC.