Discover the intricacies of setting up plumbing systems in Revit MEP, with an emphasis on adjusting view ranges and optimizing pipe layouts. Learn the importance of maintaining slope and maneuvering fittings in constrained spaces to ensure efficient and effective system design.
Key Insights
- The article provides guidance on how to adjust view ranges in Revit MEP for a more comprehensive understanding of the designed plumbing system. By altering the view depth to negative four feet, it allows for visibility of elements below level two.
- Correctly laying out the sanitary system involves careful placement of pipes and fittings. Pipes should ideally come out of the wall straight instead of at an angle to ensure easier installation and maintenance.
- While setting up the sanitary system, maintaining the slope of the pipes is crucial to ensure proper drain flow. Despite it being a time-consuming process, it is recommended for efficient and accurate system design, especially for longer runs where incorrect slopes could pose significant issues.
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Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for Revit MEP for plumbing. In the previous video, we went ahead and continued with our sanitary system. Now what we want to go ahead and do is we want to start getting our second floor dialed, and we're going to have to kind of adjust some things.
But what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to hop to my number two plumbing level. So I'm going to go here, number two plumbing. And notice that we're not seeing our overhead or our stuff that we just drew.
Now that's because our view range is not going all the way down. So what I want to end up doing is I'm going to change my view range a little bit. I'm going to go here under View Range Edit.
I'm going to change my view depth to be negative four feet. So I changed the view depth to be negative four feet. So I see four feet down below level two, which should allow me to see what I need to see.
I hit apply. I hit okay. And you can see we've started to see some of the piping.
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Now, one thing you may notice is that, well, we have a couple of issues. The main issue here is going to go ahead and be, we don't want this to necessarily be directly in the wall. We want it to kind of be over in this overhead space here.
We'll need to redraw this pipe—not a terribly big deal—but it makes the vents and everything and the risers and everything a little bit easier if we do it that way. So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm actually going to delete the fitting and the pipe. I still have the vertical in there.
And then what I'm going to do is from here, I'm going to select it. I'm going to right-click, draw pipe. I'm still doing four-inch, still slope up eighth of an inch.
That is good. I'm going to kind of come out of the wall a bit. I can come straight out of the wall and then 45 over and then come down.
So it gets a little bit longer, and then we're going to kind of come back to the wall and come over, and that will eventually be our cleanout. So I'm going to take that up. Let's go ahead and take this up and just leave it there for right now.
I'm going to do the same thing down here. We're going to have to draw a pipe, come out of the wall straight. That's typically how we want to come out of the wall.
It's very hard to drywall around a 45-degree angle there. We come out of the wall straight, boom, 45. I'm not quite long enough.
So I got to go a little farther. And again, this is all based on these fittings here to here. And then I'm just going to do that.
And we can always move this farther down. Well, I need to get this here. So because I'm only doing the view depth, notice how I can't drag a window over this.
That's because I only adjusted the view depth and not the entire cut range. If this was actually in my cut range, I could go ahead and drag a window. I kind of like the fact that I can't drag a window, though.
Just because it stops me from selecting things that I may not want to select. There we go. Perfect.
So I'm ready to go ahead and start doing this. So I'm going to go to my Systems. I'm going to go Pipe.
We can go with a different pipe here, I think. Let's go a quarter inch. We'll go to three-inch.
Let's see, what is the connector here? And I wanted a quarter out. We'll actually make it a two-inch pipe. So pipe, we'll go two-inch, slope up, inherent elevation.
And if we need to change the pipe size of our other ones a little bit later, we can go there. And then actually, I want to go back because I need to do that vertical. So inherent elevation, pipe size two-inch, quarter inch equals a foot.
There we go. Let's see here. I want to get the right and then we'll go three feet up.
It may not be tall enough, but that's okay. We'll find that out later. Inherent elevation.
Again, I know it seems like a process for this, and it kind of is. I won't lie, but it's one of those things that you just have to work through, especially with the slope piping. I know that there are possibly some faster ways to do it, where you can group things together, do that kind of thing.
The biggest problem with that is maintaining your slope, I have found, can be very, very tough. And if you're doing, you know, in the short runs, having that exactly be sloped, it may not necessarily cause a huge issue. I could see, though, in very long runs that it could be troublesome.
So I'd like to err on the side of caution and make sure my slope is correct and go from there. Inherent elevation. There's that.
There's that. Keep going. There we go.
And let's go out to the upper and do the same exact thing. So this one's kind of weird. I kind of might have to, we might have to look at the location of this a little bit, but that's fine.
We might have to move that out a little bit, but here, oh, I forgot my inherent elevation. Make sure you remember your inherent elevation, or you're going to have a bad time. So in this one, I may not be able to go off at a 45.
That's fine. In some instances, I might just take it. So inherent elevation, and it's probably not a terribly big deal that that one's just going to be straight off, but then I can go back to the 45.
And that's because this is so tight with all these fittings here. Kind of come up to here, 45, there, there, three feet, inherent elevation, here, here, here, three feet, inherent elevation. I don't know why they haven't made that button just stay selected.
I kind of wish that they did, but it is what it is. Inherent elevation here, here, three feet. Perfect.
And then I'm just going to go back through and delete these fittings and the horizontal portions of pipe. You could go through and try to select them all at one time. I have found that for myself, sometimes I'll misclick and deselect things.
So usually once I get to a certain number—six, seven, eight objects—I like to just delete it just so that I have it taken care of in case I accidentally misclick, hit escape, or who knows what happens. And there we go. Perfect.
I'm going to stop this video here. We'll come back and we'll get everything else tightened. See that.