Building services engineering in Vaud and Geneva, in English

Who we work for

Owners of villas and apartment buildings around Geneva and on La Côte with an ageing oil, gas or electric heating system. Committees of a PPE — a condominium association, where each owner holds a share of a building and decisions are taken in general meeting. International organisations and their property managers, investors in Swiss residential stock, and architects and general contractors who need the technical part of a permit file right first time.

For all of them the procedure, not the engineering, is the hard part : the documents exist only in French, and the deadlines are cantonal, so Vaud and Geneva differ.

One practice for all the building systems

Heating, ventilation, hot water, comfort cooling, plumbing, electrical work and controls are covered by a single mandate, under our technical coordination. That means one point of contact, one contract and one programme — what an architect abroad would call an HVAC or MEP consultant, Swiss procedure included.

Our method is a sentence : the calculation before the catalogue. A heat demand balance to SIA 380/1, heating power to SIA 384/201 and hot water to SIA 385/2 come first ; the machine is chosen afterwards. SIA is the Swiss engineers' and architects' association, whose standards the authorities apply. An oversized heat pump costs more, runs less efficiently and makes more noise — and noise is what stops projects here.

We do not sell equipment

We are not installers, we represent no manufacturer and we take no commission on supply. We are paid for our engineering mandates only, so the recommendation in a report is the one the figures support. We put installers into competition and check what is fitted.

Eight items are routinely missing from an installer's quotation, and we price them from the start : hydraulics and balancing, controls, domestic hot water, acoustics, the electrical connection, the permit, the subsidy file and commissioning.

Swiss procedures, explained

• Building permit. In Vaud a project goes through the mise à l'enquête, a public consultation, and the file is circulated to cantonal services by CAMAC, the cantonal permit clearing house ; the energy part consists of the EN-VD forms, the standard cantonal energy forms. Geneva has its own procedure, and the OCEN — the cantonal energy office — expects a building energy concept, with the IDC heat consumption index for existing buildings.
• Energy certificate. The CECB is the cantonal building energy certificate, graded A to G ; it is called GEAK in German-speaking Switzerland. The CECB Plus version adds a costed renovation scenario and is often a precondition for subsidies. The practice is a certified CECB expert and issues both.
• Label. Minergie is the Swiss low-energy building label, with the stricter Minergie-P and Minergie-ECO variants. We are a member of the Minergie association and take projects through certification.
• Subsidies. The Programme Bâtiments is the joint federal and cantonal building subsidy scheme, run canton by canton, and the application must be filed before the works start. In Vaud in 2026 an air-to-water heat pump in a single-family house attracts CHF 5,000, and double-flow ventilation CHF 2,400 per dwelling where the envelope reaches CECB class A to C.

What has changed in Vaud

A cantonal decree in force since 1 January 2025 sets 1 January 2033 as the deadline for fixed electric resistance heating and electric water heaters ; owners must notify the cantonal energy directorate. Where the building has a central hydraulic system the replacement must be mainly renewable — gas is excluded. Since 1 January 2026 the 1,000 m altitude limit on heat pumps no longer applies in Vaud, so the question is performance and noise, not a ban. A revised cantonal energy act was adopted on 3 February 2026, in force from January 2027 as announced.

Full detail sits on our French pages, the electric heating decree and the heating replacement study. We go through them with you in English.

Selected projects

• Extension and Minergie renovation of a 47-flat building, Geneva (Petit-Saconnex district, 2026) : five new flats on a 1959 block, new heat production, demand-controlled extract ventilation, tender documents.
• Eight new houses over a shared underground car park, Trélex (2026, completed) : an 8 kW air-to-water heat pump per house, car park ventilation with CO and NO detection, nine tenders compared.
• New seven-flat condominium building, Thônex (2024) : a 20 kW ground-source heat pump on two 240 m boreholes, geocooling, 11.8 m² of solar thermal, photovoltaics.
• Modular six-classroom school pavilion, canton of Geneva (2025, completed) : a 24.3 kW air-to-water heat pump, radiators at 40/35 °C, 800-litre buffer tank, BIM drawings.
• New house with a reversible heat pump, Orbe (2026) : a 12 kW air-to-water unit on R290 propane, floor cooling, production variants compared, EN-VD forms.

All our references (in French)

Michael Zgraggen

A Swiss graduate engineer in building services technology, Michael Zgraggen has worked in construction since 2007 — as a heating project manager, then in Geneva and Lausanne engineering practices — and founded the practice in 2020. He examines for the Vaud cantonal diploma in heating design and lectures for SVIT, the Swiss property professionals' association. Swiss German is his mother tongue ; he answers in English or French equally.