Explore the intricate process of developing an efficient piping plan. This article provides an in-depth look into various strategies for avoiding obstacles, such as walls, correctly drawing and connecting pipes, and effectively utilizing software tools for a seamless design process.
Key Insights
- When designing a piping plan, it's often beneficial to avoid routing pipes through walls if possible. This requires strategic planning and foresight, as well as a deep understanding of the layout and structure at hand.
- An efficient piping plan involves adjusting pipe lengths, removing unneeded parts such as elbows, and aligning pipes accurately with their respective sprinklers. This process often requires a combination of manual adjustments and software tools.
- Utilizing software like Revit can significantly enhance the efficiency of the design process. It allows for easy adjustments of pipe elevations, maintaining connections with arm overs and drops, and a 3D visualization of the fire sprinkler system for better understanding and progress tracking.
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Okay, let's go back to our piping plan. Typically, we don't want to run our pipe through walls if we can help it. A lot of the time that is the case, but if we can avoid it, we might as well.
If we look here, we can route our pipe going down and over and avoid going through this wall. So let's do that. Let's take our section and shorten it.
We can go to this piece and extend that out again. Okay, so we're looking at this sprinkler here first. Let's go ahead and find it.
There we are. We'll start off doing the same thing. We'll draw a pipe (1 inch)—a little too short at 11 feet, 10 inches.
So I'm going to make that 12 feet. Okay, now I want to get rid of this elbow and pull this back a little bit. Let's do the other two.
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We'll find this sprinkler here, draw a pipe (1 inch), get rid of the elbow, pull it back just a tad, and one more—pan over to the right. There it is. Let's see what that looks like on our piping plan.
This sprinkler right here, draw a pipe (1 inch). Now the main is closer, but in this case, we could arguably connect to either. We'll go to our branch line in this case. We'll go over towards the left and get rid of that.
Now let's go back to our piping plan. Find this piece, hold down Control, and select the next one and the next one. Let's go to the Move tool and move it—2 feet, 2 inches should work.
Okay, that looks good. Now in our piping plan, we can drag this there and pull this to be directly aligned with the sprinkler. Draw a pipe (1 inch).
Okay, let's do two more. Pan over, connect into there, and one more. All right, now remember, we don't want those transition pieces.
So get rid of them. You can pull this up just a tad. Find the next one, and remove that transition piece.
We've made a lot of good progress, and the last thing we would want is for Revit to crash or something to happen. So let's save. Okay, now we've got our arm overs and our branch lines connected in this area.
Again, here we'll do this separately. Now let's bring this up to Level 2. So what I want to do is pan all the way across to here.
Make sure you have all of this selected. Now we don't want to bring up the main because we already have one on Level 2. So hold Shift and select that main.
We also don't want to bring the sprinklers up because we have those on Level 2 as well. We'll go to our Filter, deselect lines and sprinklers. Okay, now let's go to Copy to Clipboard and go to our Level 2 piping plan. Now go to Paste > drop-down > Align to Current View.
That's looking pretty good so far. However, we are going to need to change the elevation of some of these because if we look at our main—let's select that—it is at 10 feet, 6 inches. When we copy these up, they are at 12 feet. We want them to run out the side of the main.
There's no reason for them to be on riser nipples coming up above the main. So let's go ahead and select all of our branch lines. This time, we can drag across from right to left.
We can see we have all of our branch lines selected. Now let's change the elevation to 10 feet, 6 inches, and we've maintained connection with our arm overs and drops, which is a really nice feature of Revit. Now let's do the same thing.
Start from right and go to the left. Change that elevation to 10 feet, 6 inches. Okay, now we can check out our 3D fire sprinkler system and pan around a little bit. We're not done, but we've made quite a bit of progress and it's looking pretty good.
You can see some of the sprinklers here we haven't connected yet—and we'll get there. Okay, let's go back to the Level 2 piping plan. In the next video, we'll start connecting everything.
