Connecting Piping Systems to the Main: A Step-by-Step Guide

In the previous video, we went ahead and got our, we talked a bit about piping systems and then we also got our second floor going with our hot and cold water lines. Now let's talk about how do we connect this into our main.

So I think the pathway that we want to go ahead and use is going to be this little area right back here, which is the, in the house, right behind this housekeeping room. So I'm gonna go down to my first floor. And do we have a working section yet? Yes, we do.

So this little section, and if you're, if you go back to when we drew in that system or that point of connection in there, we drew in this working section so we could go ahead and see what it was looking like here as we went vertical. Well, I'm going to take that section. I'm going to start to move this around the drawing.

The one thing you want to be wary of is obviously having a number of working sections is really, really nice, but you don't want to have too many. Every view that you draw, everything that you create in Revit adds to the file size. If you just keep creating working sections as you're going, you're going to add to that file size.

And that's going to eventually, maybe not right off the bat, maybe not at the beginning of the job, but closer as you get farther to the end of the job. If you don't clean out those extra views that you're not using, uh, it's going to start to slow down your system because whenever Revit redraws a view or whenever Revit moves something or calculate something, it's redoing that for pretty much almost all the views that are there now. So you want to make sure that you're keeping this view is kind of nice, kind of clean.

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Um, you know, you might want two or three working sections. If I don't really think you want to get up over 10, if you have a very large building, that might be a case of where you get to that. Um, you know, a large high rise or a mid rise, something along those lines.

But in most projects, I wouldn't say I'd try to keep it under 10, maybe even under five and just take these moving sections or these working sections and move them around with you. So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to go ahead and drag this over here and I'm going to go ahead and we're going to tap out, say right here and start to come up. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to go to my systems.

I'm going to go pipe again. I'm working with my domestic hot water first. My nine six is fine for now.

Right now we'll go ahead and actually go here, drag over, pick. Now that I think about though, I don't really want that to be at nine six. I kind of want this to pop up and over just so that these are going to be running at a higher elevation and it's very easy to do.

So I'm going to undo. I just undid that by using control Z or using undo up here. What I can go ahead and do is I'm going to go back to pipe and let's say I want to set this elevation to say 10 foot six.

There we are. What I'm going to end up doing now is again, I'm still doing my domestic hot water. I'm going to click here, pick, drag over, pick.

Now, why isn't it visible in my view? Well, remember it's not visible in the view because it's outside of my view range. I went above that 10 foot view range that we had and we'll fix that. So I'm going to hit escape.

It's still drew it. You notice that it put the fitting in and there's a pipe kind of coming up at up at us out of the screen. If I go ahead, I'm going to change my view range and let's say I make this 11 feet.

The top of my view range, 11 feet apply. Okay, there it is. I'm going to go pipe again.

I'm going to go here, click there, drag down. Oh, what happened? Well, I forgot to change my pipe system. Now I can take care of this pretty simple.

I can go ahead and hover this tab select and let's see, I could change this to domestic cold water right there and it ties it back in. But notice that Revit will not generate an error if you use the wrong piping system and connect it into a different pipe. So that's just one thing to be mindful of as you switch between drawing different pipes and different systems that it will not automatically tie it into that pipe if you're using that pipe tool.

So what I'm going to go ahead and do, let's see here. That's the three inch size. This should be a three inch size.

Perfect. I'm going to go pipe. Let's go ahead and check our pipe system again.

Make sure we want our domestic cold water. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to drag here, drag over, pick, there we go.

And then what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to go ahead and take a peek at this in section so I can see that both pipes are visible in my section. I'm going to go ahead and double click into that view and we might need to make it a little bit higher. So as you can see, we're really close to the ceiling here.

What I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to go ahead and just, I can select this guy. And if I want to draw a vertical portion of pipe, I could hover right here on that little square with the, with the target in there, right? Click draw pipe. I'm going to go up and there we go.

And I'm just going to draw up kind of wherever I need to for right now. You can kind of see the blue pipe beyond it. I am in hidden line.

So what I'm actually going to do when I'm working with pipes like this, what I sometimes like to do is I like to be in a wire frame. And what that allows me to do is it allows me to see those pipes. So I can select that blue pipe in the background.

Again, same exact thing. I hover on the, where it says drag, right? Click drop pipe. I don't know.

I don't want to click and tie these in the, or I can click. It's not going to tie those together. In some instances, I think if I go directly to like the end of the pipe, it wants to see how it tied all those together.

We don't want that to happen. So, but if I don't click on the actual like end of the pipe, there we go. So again, I'm going to go through that one more time.

I'm just undoing. So again, I select it, right? Click drop pipe. I'm going to go up.

And again, I'm not going to worry about the elevation right now. We'll figure the elevation out later. And then from here, I'm going to change this over to wireframe.

Select this guy, right? Click drop pipe. Let's go up again. If I'm not picking on like say this end point or that connector, I just drag up.

It's just drawing it up. Great. Let's take a look here in 3D and we might need to remove this section box a little bit, but let's kind of see how this is looking.

So here is my vertical connector. Now one thing we can do is you can draw some pipe in 3D, and this is a viable option. We have an elevation set here and we can always go back and change the elevation of the pipe.

So I could select this, right? Click draw pipe. If I want to come, you kind of have to look at how, you know, it's kind of tough to tell exactly what angle you're coming off at, but sometimes I like to just draw just a horizontal portion and then I'll come back and fix it later on. So you can draw in 3D here and draw your pipe.

Now, obviously they're not the right elevation. So I'm going to select this guy. I want reference level for this pipe to be level two.

You can see that by changing the reference level, it doesn't change the height of the pipe. It just changes the measurement from my reference of where I'm measuring. Obviously I think seven foot six is going to be a little low for that.

So let's change that to nine feet. I'm going to do the same thing here. Come here again, change my reference level to level two.

Let's go nine feet, which that one already was, which is kind of nice. Let's go check, take a look at this and plan because I think they're kind of at a weird angle and we'll clean it up. I'm going to go to my plumbing plan here.

Yeah. And you can see it and they're at a little bit of a weird angle. So I'm going to drag this over.

I'm going to drag this over and then you can adjust the location of this pipe. Now if you want to switch the hot water and the cold water location, you're going to get an error because technically that pipe is reversed. So the duct slash pipe is modified to be in the opposite direction, causing the connections to be invalid.

It would delete that element if I wanted it to. We have our pipes. There we go.

There we go. And I could technically take this and slide this all the way back. If I wanted to, you could also grab this vertical pipe.

Let's see if it wants to give it to me. There it is. And I could take this and I could slide this back if I wanted to also.

So those are against the wall. Again, that one's a little bit tougher to get a hold on. So let me do that one more time.

I just undid. So you kind of have to hover here or I could do say like that. And then I could grab it.

I could use the move command if I wanted to, and I'm not going to worry about specifically where I'm doing it. I'm just going to kind of get it close and there we go. And then I could slide this guy back over again.

Don't slide it so far though, that you make the fittings overlap again, because you're not going to be able to, it doesn't work right. You can't have to have that portion of pipe there for the fittings and everything to work. So you need to go ahead.

And a lot of times you'll see that those systems that people put in, they try to give like a minimum offset of this. They may say, Hey, we want a minimum of like a six inch length of pipe here or a one foot length of pipe, depending upon the system. Let's say that maybe you want to refine it a little bit and you say, Hey, I can turn this in.

I can turn this item 45 degrees. So you could also do that. A lot of times when I'm doing that kind of aspect, what I'll end up doing is I'll just delete this fitting.

I'm going to grab this end of the pipe. I'm going to find my 45 degree increment, which in this instance was 135 degrees. So I could select this, drag it over, find my 135.

And then I just trim those together. TR for trim, click on what I want to keep. I'm going to pick here, pick here.

And there we go. And it creates a little bit cleaner system. I can go ahead and go like that.

Maybe in design documents and engineering drawings, they may not go to that. But if maybe you are doing BIM coordination and doing say shop drawing level kind of stuff, they may want that aspect there. Perfect.

What I can go ahead and do is I'm going to go ahead and bring this out. I could take this guy out, drag it to here. And there we go.

Notice that because this was at nine feet and this is at nine foot six, it put in a little transition here. I'm going to go here, do the same exact thing. Drag it over to here, pick.

There was not enough room to place the required fittings. Okay. So let's take a look at this.

We might want to play with our pipe sizes here a little bit. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is we don't need this information. I almost moved the link.

Make sure that your link, one thing actually we forgot to do when we link this in, make sure you pin this guy. If you accidentally select a link in the background, we don't want to move it. Go ahead and select the pin up here.

We're select the link and then click on the pin and that's going to lock it in place and not allow you to move it. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and it's wanting to give me that.

I'm going to go ahead and select some of these fittings because we don't really need all this stuff here. And I'm going to trim these together. Trim, trim, trim, trim.

So let's see here. So this is not wanting to connect. And the reason why that is because this was a three inch line going to a three inch line, right? This is a three inch line going to a two and a half inch or two inch line.

So there's other transitions and things that you have to put in there to go ahead and do that. So what I can go ahead, there's a couple of different ways of doing this. In this instance, I know that this is going to be kind of a main water service for this floor.

So I'm actually going to go ahead and upgrade this to a three inch line. And then I can go ahead and drag this over and place it. And there we go.

Let's take a look at this in 3D and see how this came out. I think it came out pretty nice because I think how we did it in such a fashion that we don't have any clashes. So again, to get that view, what I ended up doing is on my level two plumbing plan, I selected both of these fittings.

I went to the selection box here, took a look and it creates a 3D crop view of just those guys there. And that looks pretty nice. So automatically put those fittings in there for me.

Great. Let's go ahead and save this video, save them all. And I'll see you in the next one.