Explore the complexities of designing sanitary systems in Revit MEP for plumbing, focusing on the challenges of using slope piping and the specifics of stacking integration. The discussion dives into details, such as starting points, points of connections, plumbing codes, and the transition to PVC DWV piping.
Key Insights
- The initial plan for designing a sanitary system should start from the farthest point of connection. This determines how high or low the system can be, a key element for slope piping.
- Traditionally, plumbing code dictates that any pipe three inches under slopes at a quarter inch over a foot and any pipe over four inches slopes at the eighth inch over a foot. These parameters influence the system layout and the creation of stacks.
- Transitioning to PVC DWV piping is an important step in designing sanitary systems in Revit, with elements like T sanitaries, couplings, routing sizes, and routing preferences already set for schedule 40 PVC pipe.
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Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for Revit MEP for plumbing. In the previous video, we hopefully went ahead and got your midterm all squared away and submitted into the learning management system. And as we start moving forward, we're going to start kind of working on our next system, which is going to go ahead and be our sanitary system.
Now, the sanitary system here, what we want to go ahead and do is connect all the waste from the toilets and the sinks and all this kind of stuff. And I will say that this is going to take some time. Slope piping is a great tool in Revit, but it can be very cumbersome.
We kind of have to be very specific in how we do things. And then at the end of this, we'll be tying all our systems together to go through that. So I want to kind of go through this.
We'll get the systems laid out and then we'll go ahead and tie all the fixtures and everything into those systems once we are ready to go with them. So let's go ahead and talk about slope piping for a minute. I'm back here in my 3D view, and you want to kind of start to think about where you're starting your slope piping system.
Traditionally, you're going to want to possibly start from your farthest point of connection, which for us is going to kind of be all the way over here. We're going to say that our point of connection is going to be over here, kind of similar to where we have the other mechanical room where our water's coming in and all this kind of stuff. So what we want to end up doing is we're going to kind of start with our main all the way down here.
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We'll tie this in. The reason why we want to start at the farthest point of connection is because that is going to be our defining point for how high we can be or how low we can be. The main thing that we want to be wary of with regard to this is going to be obviously where our point of connection is going to end up.
Traditionally, any pipe that is going to be three inches or under slopes at a quarter inch over a foot. Any pipe over four inches typically slopes at an eighth inch over a foot. That's typical plumbing code there.
We'll kind of create some stacks. Each of these here will be stacked. You know, the same waste will be going up from each of these and connecting into those.
The toilets will all kind of stack together, those kinds of things. We'll probably have a couple of different main runs and then we'll have a couple of different stacks. But the slope piping isn't too terribly different.
I'm going to hop into my plumbing level one here and let's go into that view real quickly. And let's talk about slope piping before we get into it. I'm going to go over to my Systems tab.
I'm going to go to Pipe. And here under Pipe, now we obviously don't want it to be a copper pipe.
We're not using copper for this. So go ahead and change your pipe type to be PVC DWV. This is going to be our domestic waste vent.
If I hit Edit Type here and I look at my routing preferences, pull this onto the monitor, you can see it has everything that I need there. We have T-sanitaries, couplings, all of our routing sizes, and our routing preferences are already set to get ready. We are using Schedule 40 PVC pipe.
If I hit OK and then I hit OK. We're going to kind of transition to this PVC DWV piping here. What I'm going to go ahead and do is obviously change our system type.
Remember, if you recall in the previous video, we created a new system type for our natural gas, but we want to go ahead and change this to our—let's see here. Where is our sanitary? There is the sanitary. We have our sanitary line there.
You can choose your elevations. And when we talk about sloping, there is a lot of stuff up here that we're going to start using that we really haven't changed or that we haven't used quite yet. We've always kind of had it automatically connect to inherent elevation.
You can use inherent size at vertical change slope. But here is what we're going to be using a lot of. We have slope up and slope down. The slope values I've kind of populated there so we can choose our slope.
Now, when I choose slope down and I choose a slope of, say, a quarter inch equals a foot, and I click and I drag, it's going to be sloping that pipe. And let me just show you. If I select it, you'll notice I have one value here.
I have another value here. This is my slope value, and this is my slope indicator. I can flip that.
And if I wanted to—but let's take a look at this in section really quickly. So I'm going to grab one of my working sections and you can just watch for right now.
If I look at this, you can see how that pipe is sloping. OK, so I'm going from negative two, and I just grabbed the grip by accident. Let me undo that.
But then tying into this, that is kind of the tough part about this—where do we want to go ahead and tie this in? So that's just one of those things that we'll kind of have to go ahead and deal with. But yeah, so I think for the most part it's pretty simple to draw slope piping, but you can change the slope extremely easily. And that's the one thing you have to be aware of—that you can change the slope.
I could go in here and type in quarter inch over 12 inches, and it's going to refix that. When I draw my pipe, my middle elevation is going to be the start. And if I draw these pipes in section, you'll notice if I'm dragging a straight line.
Do you see how my guideline is kind of going away from the centerline of the pipe? And that's because on the contextual tab here, I'm still under slope down. So it knows that I want to draw straight across. But since I've said, hey, I want you to slope down, it's going to do that.
I could go slope up. It's going to do the same thing. And if I turn off my slope, then it's just staying there with my line.
All right. You'll also notice that for sanitary, this is green. Again, this is defined in the piping systems.
Green is a fairly typical color, I would say, for the sanitary systems. So there is that there. I'm going to go and delete this guy and return back to my plumbing level one view.
Let's go ahead, Zoom Extents, CTRL+S and save. And when we come back, we'll start laying out the system.
See you then.