Building services engineering in Vaud and Geneva, in English

Who we work for

We work for owners of houses and apartment buildings around Geneva and on La Côte whose oil, gas or electric heating is reaching the end of its life. We work for the committees of a PPE — the Swiss form of condominium, in which each owner holds a share of the building and decisions are taken at a general meeting. And we work for international organisations and their property managers, for investors in Swiss residential stock, and for architects and general contractors who need the technical half of a permit application right the first time.

For most of them the difficulty is not the engineering but the procedure. The forms exist only in French, and the rules are cantonal, so what applies in Vaud does not apply in Geneva.

One practice for every building system

Heating, ventilation, domestic hot water, comfort cooling, plumbing, electrical installations and controls come under a single appointment and our technical coordination. One point of contact, one contract, one programme. It is the role an architect elsewhere would give to an HVAC or MEP consultant, with the Swiss procedure included.

The method takes one sentence. A heat load calculation to SIA 380/1, heating output to SIA 384/201 and domestic hot water to SIA 385/2 come first, and the machine is chosen afterwards. SIA is the Swiss society of engineers and architects, whose standards the authorities apply. An oversized heat pump costs more to buy, runs less efficiently and makes more noise — and noise is what stops projects in Switzerland.

We sell no equipment

We are not installers, we represent no manufacturer and we take no commission on supply. Our income is our engineering fees, so the recommendation in a report is the one the figures support. We put installers in competition with one another, and we inspect what is actually fitted.

Eight things are routinely missing from an installer's quotation, and we cost them from the outset: the hydraulics and their balancing, the controls, domestic hot water, acoustics, the electrical supply, the permit, the subsidy application and commissioning.

Swiss procedures, in plain English

• Building permit. In Vaud an application goes out to public consultation, the mise à l'enquête, and CAMAC, the cantonal clearing house, circulates it to the cantonal departments. The energy part is the set of EN-VD forms, the standard cantonal energy forms. Geneva runs its own procedure, in which the cantonal energy office, the OCEN, expects a building energy concept based, for an existing building, on the IDC index of measured heat consumption.
• Energy certificate. The CECB is the Swiss building energy certificate, graded A to G and known as the GEAK in the German-speaking cantons. The CECB Plus version adds a costed renovation scenario and is often a condition of the subsidy. Michael Zgraggen is an accredited CECB expert and issues both.
• Label. Minergie is the Swiss low-energy building label, with stricter Minergie-P and Minergie-ECO variants. We belong to the Minergie association and take projects through certification.
• Subsidies. The Programme Bâtiments is the federal and cantonal building subsidy scheme, administered canton by canton, and the application has to be filed before work starts. In Vaud in 2026 an air-to-water heat pump in a single-family house is worth CHF 5,000, and balanced ventilation with heat recovery 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 gives owners until 1 January 2033 to replace fixed electric resistance heating and electric water heaters, and requires them to notify the cantonal energy directorate. Where the building has a central wet system, the replacement has to be mainly renewable, and gas does not qualify. Since 1 January 2026 the 1,000 m altitude limit on heat pumps no longer applies in Vaud, so at altitude the question is performance and noise rather than permission. A revised cantonal energy act was adopted on 3 February 2026 and takes effect in January 2027.

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

Selected projects

• Extension and Minergie renovation of a 47-flat building, Geneva (Petit-Saconnex, 2026): five new flats added to a block of 1959, new heat generation, demand-controlled extract ventilation, tender documents.
• Eight new houses over a shared underground car park, Trélex (2026, completed): one 8 kW air-to-water heat pump per house, car park ventilation with carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide detection, nine tenders compared.
• New seven-flat condominium, Thônex (2024): a 20 kW ground-source heat pump on two 240 m boreholes, geocooling, 11.8 m² of solar thermal collectors and photovoltaics.
• Modular six-classroom school building, canton of Geneva (2025, completed): a 24.3 kW air-to-water heat pump, radiators at 40/35 °C, an 800-litre buffer vessel, BIM drawings.
• New house with a reversible heat pump, Orbe (2026): a 12 kW air-to-water unit on R290 propane, cooling through the floor circuits, generation options compared, EN-VD forms.

All our references (in French)

Michael Zgraggen

Michael Zgraggen holds a Swiss bachelor's degree in building services engineering from the HES-SO and has worked in construction since 2007, first on the installation side as a heating contract manager, then in engineering practices in Geneva and Lausanne, before founding MZ engineering in 2020. Since 2011 he has sat on the canton of Vaud's board of examiners for the final apprenticeship examinations in heating design, and since 2024 he has lectured for SVIT, the Swiss real estate association. French, Swiss German and English are all native to him, and he works in standard German as well.