When you think of drinking water, you may think of plumbers and water treatment plants, but in fact, civil engineers play a huge role in keeping drinking water safe as well. If are trying to deal with infected water in a certain location, you may want to hire a civil engineering team to help you.

Here are a few of the elements you should discuss to see if their methods are going to work for your situation.

1. What Are the Cost Estimates?

Before hiring a civil engineer, you may want to talk about the cost elements associated with the project. You should agree on their service fee up front to avoid surprises down the road, but beyond that, you should talk about the cost objectives for the solution they are developing.

If you need a low-cost solution, make sure that the civil engineer understands those constraints before they get started.

2. Can the Engineer Think of Out of the Box Solutions?

When you are trying to make drinking water cleaner, you often have to find strategies that don't require humans to change much of their behavior. To do that, you need a civil engineer who can think outside the box.

For example, consider the challenge of treating water in urban slums such as those found in India. One common solution is to require users to change their habits by using chlorine tablets or filters in their own homes. Another possibility is to invest money into water treatment plants.

However, that is all easier said than done. A more innovative, outside-the-box solution may be to treat the water at its source, which in this situation may be a pump down the street from the home. The pumps could be connected to a chlorine dosing system that automatically sanitizes the water as it comes out of the pump. Ask the engineer to tell you a little bit about their previous experiences with out-of-the-box solutions before you hire them.

3. What Are the Requirements for Prototyping?

Once the civil engineer dreams up a solution for your water sanitation needs, they typically have to develop a prototype. That allows you to test their solution in practice, rather than just looking at the design in the theory stage.

For example, some civil engineers may be able to make prototypes relatively inexpensively using a 3D printer. Others may need to hire an industrial facility to produce the prototype. Again, these are costs and considerations you need to work into your plan.

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