ProjX Model Gas Piping

K. In this video, I wanna cover the basics of modeling piping. Now this is all a nonhydronic system, so we won't be doing any hydronic piping. But this is a gas rooftop unit, so we can draw a bit of a gas connection. Now I think most firms probably show the gas on the plumbing sheets, although I have run into a few that show the gas on the mechanical sheets, so that's what we're going to assume for this model.

We're gonna run the piping and show it on the mechanical sheets. So just real simple design. It's gonna come off the rooftop unit. It's gonna run along the roof to over the utility room. It's gonna drop straight down, and then it's gonna exit the building right here. So very simple gas piping system. And we're gonna start here where it comes in. You could start at the unit and go back. It's kinda, you know, a user's choice. But for this, we're gonna start here.

We're gonna go up to the roof and over, and then we're gonna make the connection. So let's just start modeling some pipe. So you can go to the systems tab, pipe, you can also just type p I, and that will enter into pipe drawing mode. Okay. So we're in pipe drawing mode, and a few things happened that we need to pay attention to. We need to get our settings straight. So we got a sub ribbon option here, so we can set the diameter of the pipe, one inch sounds fine to me. The middle elevation middle refers to the middle of the pipe. So here we're gonna set that to two feet, and you know, you don't have to click apply. In fact, you don't want to hit apply here.

So let's say if if I wanted it 20, all I have to do is move the mouse out of that and it it sets that field. But I want it to be two, so I just type two, move the mouse away, Then I come over here to the properties, and on pipe types, we have three options out of the box. MP Standard, that's for hydronics and domestic hot and cold water, and also for gas, and also for things like refrigerant lines, you wanna model those, which if you can get away with it, don't. And then p drainage is obvious, and p vent is obvious. So we're we're mechanical folks around here, we don't mess with these, so we just wanna be an NP standard for everything.

And here's some more information about the elevation and the reference level. So the reference level is set just based on the view you start drawing in, and that set that's the reference for the elevation. So the elevation is saying it's two feet above m e p o one. If the reference level were different, it would be relative to that other level. We'll come back to that.

The other thing to set here is the system type. So we have options for all the different types of systems. So here we have mechanical, heat hydronic heating, water return, hydronic heating, water supply, geothermal, condenser water, chilled water, condensate drain, compressed air, you know, lots of things. We also have options for the plumbing folks. And now note that if you're modeling gas on mechanical and you want it to show up on mechanical sheets, use the MDAT natural gas.

And if you are modeling gas and you want to show up on the plumbing sheets, use p dot natural gas. Okay. And m m dot m dash natural gas is what we want, so we'll stick with that. Okay. So I think everything is ready. We can start drawing. So I'm just gonna click to set it, and as I move it, it is modeling the pipe. I'll click again for the next point, and then from here I wanna go straight up to the roof. And I know off the top of my head that the roof level is at 20 feet, so I'm gonna go just above it. So I'm gonna change the middle elevation, and I haven't clicked anything else.

I'm still in pipe mode. I move the mouse up here to the middle elevation. I'm gonna type in I'm gonna type in 23 and I move the mouse away, and then I'm going to click once again, and you can see what happened here is it moved the pipe up. So we went over it two feet, we went up to 23 feet, and then over horizontally at 23 feet. So we're up on the roof now.

We've just got our view level set really high so we can see what's going on even though the view is on the the 1st Floor. It's kinda handy for working views. Okay. And then we're coming around here. This is the gas piping connector. So I'm gonna come over here, and I'm I'm gonna swoop by it like this, treating this like a main, and then we're gonna do a sort of a branch connection onto that, maybe like stub out for future equipment or something like that. Okay. So I've got that modeled up to there. Let's go check out our three d view. See what's going on.

Okay, so we've got yep, it's gone up, and now we can see that this pipe is pretty close, if I hit front there, you can see this is the elevation of the gas connection and this is the elevation of the pipe, this is the 23 feet. I actually want my gas piping to be a little bit higher, just to give myself a little bit more space, so I'm gonna set it to 24. And how fussy you want to be with the elevations in terms of reality, it's gonna be up to you based on how the models are gonna be used and everything else. But there are things like elevations are easy to tweak. Now there's something I wanna point out, which is that because I drew all of this pipe from level one, this pipe's reference level, we mentioned earlier, is still set to MEPO 1.

So the elevation in this pipe, even though it's, you know, physically it's above the roof level, its its middle elevation is 24 feet above MEPL 1, that's what this is saying right here. But now if I came, you know, later, if I came to MEK Newark Roof Main, and I clicked on this bit of pipe, I'm sort of expecting it to tell me what the elevation is above the roof level, but it's actually telling me the elevation above MEP L 1. Now I can I can change that, so I'm going to click this little spur here, and change the reference level to MEP Roof Main? And it changed the middle elevation, and now it says it's four foot. So that's that's actually much more useful.

Now these other two sticks are actually still referencing MEP 01, so I can just control select both of those, change them both over to MEP Roof Main, and these are now referencing MEP Roof Main as well. So that works out well. Okay. So now I'd like to make my piping connection, and remember this is lower than this. So I'm gonna actually select my equipment, I'm gonna right click that piping connector, and say draw pipe, and the diameter that it puts out is gonna be defined by this family.

So I'll I'll just run with that. That sounds fine. Middle elevation, this is telling me that's coming out at two nine. I'm just observing that. I because I wanna come out straight anyway, so I'm gonna I'm gonna go with that. And I'm just confirming that it's the right pipe type, MB standard, it is, and the system type is also correct. It is. So I'm gonna come out here, and I'm gonna go all the way to this until I get that blue line in the center of the vertical pipe, and I'm gonna click, and Revit is gonna make that connection for me. I come back over to my three d view and see what's going on here. So happy with this.

This looks good. And let's say that I would like to so I'm I'm I'm from a firm where the gas was plumbing's deal, so I hope I'm doing this right. I think there's a thing that you might wanna show. Might wanna leave it as a detail and don't need to do this, but I think a dirt leg is a thing on gas piping, just a vertical little step of pipe. It allows me to demonstrate a few things, so that that will that will be good here.

So I've I've selected this elbow, and you can see that there are there's a plus sign here and there's plus sign here. That enables you to turn into a t. So I'm gonna click that plus sign, and now there's a t, and I could I could model, draw a pipe, and I could keep going in this direction. And by the way, you can actually get quite far modeling pipe in a three d view, which is partly why I'm doing this because I wanna cover these these topics. I really encourage you to get comfortable modeling piping in three d views.

It's you can be much more efficient and make fewer mistakes if you master it. It's really not that hard. So by default, when you're in a three d view, Revit will constrain your options to the x y plane. So you'll notice I'm I'm moving this around. It's kinda hard to tell, but Revit is Revit is not going up with that.

Again, hard to tell, but the endpoint of this here where my cursor is is the same elevation as this point. And when I get close to a 90 degree angle, it's giving me these dash blue lines, so it's saying, hey. This is this is straight. If I if I went this way, it's saying, That's a 90, and I think it'll typically gives you a 45. Yeah. So if I wanna go 45, could do that as well. Oh, yeah. It wouldn't let me. Can't do a 45 out of a t, obviously. So, you know, I can click there.

I can click there. Now I can go 45. I can do this. So you can so you again, you can get get pretty far doing modeling in a three d view. Now about going vertical, so let's say here we are, we're we're drawing pipe, we're happy with this, and now we wanna go up. How do we do that? You know, you go like this. No. It's not working. The way you go vertical is you just change the elevation.

So here I am at two foot nine, let's say I wanna go up to five foot, just type in five, and then let's say I wanna go I wanna keep going in this direction. I click again and it makes that change. Let's say I wanna go back down, I wanna go back down to three three foot, and I wanna turn. So again, you can get really you can do quite a lot. Now let's say I wanna go I just want a vertical and I don't want to do another horizontal off of that.

How do I go vertical? So I'm gonna change my elevation to five foot again, and it's saying, okay. Well, where do you want the other piece of it? Well, I don't. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click apply, and it's gonna put in that vertical piece and it'll be done. You hit escape to close out of it. So, yeah, actually quite powerful. Three d pipe modeling, I recommend that you do that. So this is kinda crazy, so we're gonna delete it. So tab, select, delete.

And I actually wanted to show, you know, a little stub coming out down here. So now that I've got this t going in the wrong direction, there's a minus sign here. Gonna click that. It's gonna convert it back into an elbow. So I'm gonna select, hit the plus sign, t going vertically, and I'm going to right click, and I'm gonna say draw pipe. And I just want a vertical bit, so I'm going to say, okay, go down to yeah. About seven inches, that sounds right. And so I'm gonna say change the elevation to two feet and apply. And there I am. I'm done.

And I I I drew this out to kinda show that if this was a main, but if this is all that you want, so you you don't want this to keep going, you can delete that and for this t, I can hit that minus sign, turn it into an elbow. Okay. So that is modeling piping in mechanical and a bit of three d modeling trips tips and tricks. So that's pretty much all the fundamental skills that you need to do hydronics as well. I'll have videos in the future about a hydronic system, but that should give you enough to start playing with the hydronic piping.