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The Table in regulation 5 of the Water Supply (Water Fittings) Regulations 1999 is the list people most often discover after the fact. Work described in it cannot lawfully be started until the undertaker has been told and has agreed, and whatever conditions it attaches form part of the permission. Reading the Table before ordering anything is a five-minute job that occasionally saves a bathroom.

Two entries catch domestic projects that feel small. A garden watering system needs notice unless it is designed to be operated by hand, which sweeps in most buried irrigation. And any water system laid outside a building that is either less than 750mm or more than 1350mm below ground level needs notice, which is the reason an installer will ask how deep the trench is going before quoting.

Regulation 5(2) carves out a narrow exemption: the regulation does not apply to installation by an approved contractor of a fitting falling within the Table entries for extending or altering a water system on premises other than a house, for a bidet with an ascending spray or flexible hose, or for a reduced pressure zone valve assembly or other mechanical device protecting against fluid category 4 or 5. Regulation 7 makes it an offence to commence a listed operation without the required notice, without the required consent, or in breach of a condition imposed on that consent.

Regulation 4 sets the material test twice over. Every water fitting must be of an appropriate quality and standard and suitable for the circumstances in which it is used, and the regulation defines appropriate quality or standard by reference to an appropriate harmonized standard or European technical approval, an appropriate British Standard or other national specification of an EEA State giving an equivalent level of protection and performance, or a specification approved by the regulator. Every fitting must also comply with the requirements of Schedule 2 as those requirements apply to it, and where a Schedule 2 requirement relates to a water system, every fitting forming part of that system has to be fitted, altered or replaced so as to comply.

In practice that means an installer choosing between products is choosing between approvals, not between finishes. It is worth asking, in writing, which standard or regulator-approved specification each unfamiliar fitting is being supplied against, particularly for anything on the cold supply upstream of the first draw-off and for anything that connects a hose, a filling loop or an appliance to the mains.

Schedule 1 to the Water Supply (Water Fittings) Regulations 1999 grades fluids into five categories, and the level of backflow protection an installation needs follows from the worst category a fitting could draw back into the supply. Category 1 is wholesome water as supplied by the undertaker. Category 2 is water whose aesthetic quality is impaired by a change of temperature or by substances or organisms changing its taste, odour or appearance, expressly including water in a hot water distribution system. Category 3 is a slight health hazard from substances of low toxicity, the Schedule giving ethylene glycol, copper sulphate solution and sodium hypochlorite as examples.

The two that dictate hardware are the top pair. Category 4 is a significant health hazard from toxic substances, including chemicals, carcinogens and pesticides such as insecticides and herbicides, or environmental organisms of potential health significance. Category 5 is a serious health hazard from pathogenic organisms, radioactive or very toxic substances, including anything containing faecal material or other human waste, butchery or animal waste, or pathogens from any other source. This is why an outside tap, a bidet with a flexible hose, a garden irrigation line and a heating filling loop are each treated as a separate design problem rather than as plumbing.

Approved Document G covers sanitation, hot water safety and water efficiency, and three of its requirements shape domestic installation work. Requirement G2 sets a water efficiency standard for new dwellings: the estimated consumption of wholesome water, calculated with the methodology in the Approved Document, should be no more than 125 litres per person per day, or 110 litres per person per day where the optional requirement has been imposed as a condition of planning permission. The Approved Document notes that the 125 litre figure includes a fixed factor of 5 litres per person per day for outdoor use.

Requirement G3(4) is the one that changes real bathrooms. The hot water supply to any fixed bath must be designed and installed so that the temperature of the water that can be delivered to that bath does not exceed 48 degrees Celsius. The Approved Document's guidance is to limit it with an in-line blending valve or other appropriate temperature control device with a maximum temperature stop and a suitable arrangement of pipework, to keep the length of supply pipe between blending valve and outlet to a minimum, and to choose valves that fail safe and cannot easily be altered by building users.

Requirement G5 simply states that a bathroom must be provided containing a washbasin and either a fixed bath or a shower, and the Approved Document adds that any dwelling, house or flat, must have at least one such bathroom. Approved Document G is guidance for England; Wales publishes its own editions, Scotland's technical handbook deals with the same ground in its sections on sanitary facilities, water efficiency and danger from heat, and Northern Ireland uses the Department of Finance technical booklets.

Approved Document G explains the self-certification route. Under regulation 12(6) of the Building Regulations it is not necessary to notify a building control body in advance of work covered by the Approved Document if the work is of a type set out in column 1 of Schedule 3 to the Regulations and is carried out by a person registered with the corresponding scheme in column 2. To join such a scheme a person has to demonstrate competence for the type of work the scheme covers and the ability to comply with the relevant Building Regulations requirements.

The paperwork that follows is the point. Where work is done by someone registered with a competent person scheme, regulation 20 of the Building Regulations requires that the occupier be given, within 30 days of completion, a certificate confirming the work complies with all applicable Building Regulations requirements, and that the building control body be given a notice that this has been done or a copy of the certificate, again within 30 days. Building control bodies are authorised to accept those certificates as evidence of compliance, although local authority inspection and enforcement powers are unaffected.

The list of authorised schemes changes, and the Approved Document says so explicitly, advising that the current list on gov.uk should always be consulted. Ask which scheme an installer belongs to and for what type of work, rather than accepting a general claim of registration: an unvented hot water registration and a water fittings registration are different things.

The recurring failure is an appliance specified for a supply that cannot feed it. A high-output combi or a multi-head shower assumes a flow rate the incoming supply pipe may never have had, and no amount of internal pipework fixes an undersized service from the street. Measuring first is cheaper than arguing afterwards.

The second is a loft cistern removed without thinking through the consequences. Everything downstream moves from a few metres of head to mains pressure at once, which exposes every tired joint in the house and can make old taps and gravity-fed showers unusable. The third is protection designed out during the tidy-up phase: a blending valve buried behind a panel, a backflow device made inaccessible, or a discharge pipe from an unvented cylinder rerouted to look neater. Approved Document G expects an unvented system's safety devices to be chosen and installed correctly for their location, and none of that survives being boxed in.