Domestic Water Piping

Hey guys, MEP Guy here and welcome to Rev X. In this video, we're gonna go over plumbing modeling and plumbing design using Revit. And we're gonna be starting with Project X and Project X is an example project that we're gonna be working on. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go over to the project browser, expand the views, and you can see that we have a template right here that's already been set up for us. So we're gonna expand the plumbing views and we have sheet views and working views.

The working views are for modeling and the sheet views are for views that are going be placed on sheets. So let's go into the working views because we're going to be starting with modeling, expand plumbing, and we'll double click plumbing working one. So this is our working view and we're gonna do all of our modeling here. So I'm gonna zoom into this utility room and we're gonna start by pretending that this is the water service room and we're gonna start with our domestic water into the building. So to draw a pipe, we're gonna go up to the systems tab.

We'll go over to the plumbing and piping panel and select pipe. Or we can create a keyboard shortcut. You can see right there, it's PI, but you can also create new shortcuts by going to view, user interface, keyboard shortcuts, and you can create any shortcut here. You can search for the command. So here's the pipe command, and you can see that I've added a shortcut Q for piping. To add a new command, you just add it right here. And if I wanted to make it PIP, I could assign it and then I get that right there. If you want to remove it, you can remove it. So I'm going to click Okay here. So I'm going to start drawing piping.

We're going to go to systems, pipe. And when you're drawing piping, the first thing you need to do is you need to set the correct pipe type. So we have three different pipe types in this project. We have MP standard, is used for all your pressure piping. So your domestic water piping, compressed air piping, gas piping. You have drainage piping that's used for all your drainage. So basically same thing as like PVC. So you use it for storm drainage and sanitary drainage. And then we have one last one for all of our vent piping. So that's used for the vent system.

So let's click MP Standard because we're going to be drawing domestic cold water piping. And we're going to also set the system type to P dash cold water. So you can see the system classification is domestic cold water. So that's already been set for us. The next thing we need to do is set the diameter. So I'm just going to set it to two inches and we need to set the elevation. I'm going to make it negative three feet. And then we can start drawing some piping. So I'm just gonna zoom in to this area right here, and I'm gonna start at about five feet from the building and we'll click. And right now we're at negative three, so we'll click again, And then that draws the pipe.

And then to go up, we just change the elevation. So let's make it three feet above the floor now. And we'll go over. This is where we're going to put our backflow preventer. Let's click. And then I'm going to go up to the ceiling. So let's go up to 10 feet this time. We'll go over in this direction right here and click, and then we'll zoom out. And then I'm going to go into the bathroom to a point right here and click. Now, you want to get out of the pipe command, we can hit escape twice. And we have successfully drawn our piping. Now I like to see what this looks like in three d. So it's always a good idea to have a three d view open. So we're going go over to our working views, plumbing and three d plumbing. We'll double click And you can see this is the three d view.

I like to move the three d view to the other side of the screen. So we're going to move it into this scroll area right here. So I'm going to drag it. And when we move it in there, we go slow, it'll show us a blue perimeter and we'll just unclick. And you can see that we have a three d view open. If you want to zoom extents, you can double click the middle mouse wheel. So I'm going to double click the middle mouse wheel and you can see now I can zoom extents and I can see my piping. Next, I'd like to add a backflow preventer. So to do that, we're going to go up to the systems tab and go to piping accessory. And we can hit the type selector right here.

And we're going to scroll down to our small RPZ backflow preventers and select two inch. And then all we do is we hover into the piping and click. And you can see that the backflow preventer has been placed. So I'm going to hit escape twice, and then I'm going to zoom in on this backflow preventer and let's make sure that it's the correct orientation. So let's click on it, and you can see the inlet and the outlet. The inlet is over here, so we need to flip that. So there is a little flip button right here, so if we hit the little two arrows, it'll flip our pipe accessory. But now it's upside down, so we have to click on it and rotate it. There's a little rotate buttons right here, so let's rotate it twice. And now you can see the inlet is coming in and the outlet is going out.

So this is correct. So that's how you place your backflow preventer. Now let's start by placing some plumbing fixtures in the bathroom. So to place a plumbing fixture, we'll go up to systems, plumbing fixture, and click. And we'll select the P Tank tank, Tank Public Commercial. That looks good. Actually, let's use the residential type. Oh, we don't have that in our project. So I'm going to click on Tank Public Commercial and we'll click into the view that we want to place it. And for placing this, we actually want to place the insertion point right in the middle of this wall, but we don't have anything to snap to unfortunately.

So let's draw some construction lines. I'm going to hit escape twice and we'll go up to annotate detail line. And you can pick any of these line styles that we have preloaded. I like to use the red lines when I'm doing construction lines. And so then we can just make a line from here to here and hit escape and then make a line through the midpoint of this and go all the way over. And now we have a midpoint in that wall that we can use. Now, remember this working view is not going to be printed. So we won't be able to see these lines when we make our final prints. Those will be on our sheet views. So now I'm going to place the plumbing fixture again.

So I'm going to go up to system, plumbing fixture. And then the last fixture that I was placed is right here. So this is looking good. And then we'll just hover into the middle of the wall. And now you can see Revit is snapping to the midpoint of that wall or inside that chase. So we can click. And then I'm gonna hit escape twice. And now what we need to do is we need to line up the toilet. So I'm going to use the Align command. I'm going to go to Modify, Align, and we'll click the midpoint right here and the midpoint to here and hit Escape twice.

And you can see now we're lined up, but I want the tank to be along the wall. So I'm going to click. You can see we have grips here. We're gonna use those grips and we're gonna align that on the wall. And now we have our toilet or water closet perfectly aligned with our background. So this looks great. Now I can also get the toilet on the other side by using a couple different techniques. The best technique is to click on the fixture and right click and select create similar. You can also hit CS on the keyboard. Let's create similar.

And then as this fixture is loaded, I can hit the space bar twice, and then I can place it in the same location as the other water closet like this and click escape twice, and you can see that looks great. The reason why we rotated it is because we want the water connection to be on the correct side. So on a tank toilet, it's typically on the left, and so that's on the left. And then if we click on this one, can see the connections on the left. If we were to mirror this, so I'm gonna hit delete and mirror this.

So if we click on our fixture and select mirror pick axis and we pick this line, you can see that the water connection is actually on the right side of this toilet, which is not typical. And so we have to be careful when we're placing fixtures or mirroring those fixtures. But however, if we use the mirror command, we can just do it one more time by clicking mirror. But this time we don't wanna make a copy. So you can see there's options up here and we're gonna deselect copy and we'll mirror it again about that axis. And now we have the toilet perfectly placed with the water connection on the left. All right, that looks good. So now let's place our urinal. Let's go up to systems, plumbing fixture. Let's go to urinal right here.

Let's do the same thing. We'll hit space bar twice. We'll go to the midpoint. And again, we can't snap to the middle, I always go off to the side first, click escape, and then I'll align it. So modify, align, and we'll align it to the urinal, and then we'll move the grips to the wall. There we go. And lastly, let's place our lavatories. So we'll go to systems, plumbing fixture, click the dropdown, lavatory wall hung, let's use those. And let's place it in the middle here. Let's place it right there.

Hit escape twice. We'll align this, modify, align. We'll go to target, source, and then we'll pull these grips to the wall. Now for the lavatories, we want to pull this grip first because this is the drain location. So we'll go to about right there, and then we'll pull the fixture out to the wall. And there we go, we have that perfect. Now the drain locations right here, we can move that out a little bit to give us a little bit more space. You'll see why we're going to do that in a little bit. And now I can go ahead and place this fixture over here. Let's do it the correct way by clicking create similar.

We'll hit space bar twice, and then we'll place that right in the middle, right there. Hit escape. So there we go. We have all of our fixtures placed. Let's zoom out and take a look at the fixtures. You can see they're already there. And now let's start by drawing the water piping down to the fixture. So we can do it a couple of different ways. We could drag our piping to this point and then go over to the water closet. Or we could use a cool technique by clicking one of the fixtures and using connect into.

And then we select the correct connector. So let me go to the three d view so you guys can see the different connectors here. So we have this view right here. And if I click this water closet, you can see all the different connectors we have back here. So when we hit connect into, you can see that we have different connectors. So this one is the water vertical up. So we could use that connector to do a connection into it to make it very fast. So let's select this one, this first one, click Okay. And then let's select the pipe we want to use. And you can see that connection gets made right into the vertical part of the wall.

Now that's okay, but I'd actually want to show this connection at the wall. So all I have to do is back this off a little bit, and then I can click my fixture again and use connect into. And this time I'm going to select the cold water horizontal connector, click okay, and select my pipe. And so that was, we were able to do that because we have all of those different connections or connectors on our water closet or our fixture. So all of the fixtures that you get with Rev X include all these types of connectors that help with modeling.

So let's go ahead and make another connection here. Now that I'm seeing that, I actually want to probably drop down here and make the other connection over here. So let's go ahead and drop all of this piping in the wall. So I'm going to undo all that. And then this time we're going to just simply drag this piping to the middle of the wall, maybe a point like right there, cause I don't want it directly in the center, it'll hit the vent piping. And then we'll right click here, draw a pipe. And this time we're going go down to two feet. And then we're going to go over to a point about right there. And this time let's go ahead and use the horizontal connectors. So I'm gonna go to my last fixture right here and we're gonna use the horizontal connector this time.

So I'm gonna use connect into. This time let's select the horizontal one and click and select that. Now you can see the horizontal one didn't do exactly what we need to do, but we can fix that. All we have to do is select the piping that's through this point like this. So I'm gonna select it, all this, hit delete. And then we can use the trim extend command to make that connection exactly how we want it. So let's use the trim extend, click the pipe, click the pipe, and you can see now it drops it into the connection point like we'd like. Now let's make the connection to this one and then we'll resize this piping. Let's click that. You can see the connections right here.

We can use connect into. We're going to use the horizontal connector and then we can select our pipe just like that. So that looks good, but now this piping is way too big. So we can select all of our piping in a three d view, just like this. And then we can go up to the diameter and we can select something like three quarter inch and you can see that looks a lot better. Now let's continue making water connections to our other fixtures. This time, let's use the three d view and we'll click on our urinal. We'll use connect into, and I'd like to use the connection that's right at the flush valve. So we'll go to the horizontal one. You can see the arrow points right to it.

We'll click Okay. And we'll click our main and you can see that connection gets made. We can probably resize all of this piping, but first let's connect our lavatories. So we'll do the same thing. We'll click on our fixture, use connect into. We're going to use the horizontal cold water. So this one, and we'll click our main, and then we'll click this fixture, connect into horizontal cold water and click our main. And then anytime you wanna rotate around something, you can click it and then hold shift in the middle mouse wheel, and you can see I can orbit around that fixture. So it really helps when I'm doing my modeling. So you can see those connections got made perfectly in there.

So this is looking really good. I wanna review a couple ways you can make connections as well. So let's go to a floor plan and let's go ahead and just select this piping right here and we'll hit delete. And then we'll trim this together. So we'll use the trim command to trim these together. And then this time I wanna show you guys how to make a connection just from a floor plan. So if we click the fixture, we can obviously use connect into in a floor plan. So we can select the cold water horizontal and you can see the little connector arrow right here. We can click on our main, so that looks good. We're gonna control Z and undo that.

But I also wanna show you, you guys can always make connections right from the fixture by clicking the little grip. And we can use draw a pipe. You just have to make sure you put it on the correct pipe type, and then we can drop it right into this main just like that. Now it didn't make the connection, and I think that's because, let me select this. It's because it just didn't register the pipe.

So anytime you have piping that's perpendicular, what you can do is you can use the trim extend single element command. So I'm going click that one and we can select our main and select our pipe. You could see that connection does in fact get made just like this. So I would obviously recommend the connect into, but you're welcome to use the connectors as well. Let's do one more type of connection. So I'm going to undo that. And you can always go from your main to your fixture as well. So if I go to this main right here, I can click, I can right click and say create similar. I'm going to go ahead and change the diameter of my piping to three quarter inch. And right now my elevation is at two feet.

So unfortunately, I would have to bring this up to this connection point. So I would have to know what the elevation of this was. So if you want to check what the elevation is of your fixture, you can click on your fixture and you can see that we have some different dimensions right here. These are instance parameters. So these can be changed with each instance of your plumbing fixture.

But if you want to change all of the plumbing fixture instances, you go to edit type and these will change the types of your fixture. So we have some parameters right here and you can see there's water connection height at three foot 10. So this is actually the elevation of my water connections. So I'm gonna use that number and you can always copy these numbers. So if I right click or hit control C, hit okay, and then I'll go up to systems, pipe.

I can now type in the elevation. So I'm going to highlight it and I can use control V to paste it in. And if I wanted to just type in three foot 10, here's a good trick. All I have to do is three space 10 and then hit enter and you can see it will automatically put it at three ten. So that's kind of a good little trick. Let's just check to make sure it's on the correct system and then we'll click and then we'll click our pipe. What I was gonna show you though is I wanted to show you, you can go from your main first into your fixture just like that. Now, unfortunately, it's not letting us do it and that's because there are some reference lines. You can see them highlight right here. And so that's why I would probably recommend not using this technique.

We could just go right from the connection point here and we can try to go into the pipe and there you go. So sometimes it does work and that's just the way Revit is because it's trying to pick up different connections and Revit sometimes picks up different things. So there we go. Now if we want to resize all this piping, we can. One way to do it is you can select the last point of the pipe you want to resize and then you can basically tab into the run of piping that you want to select.

So if I wanna select all this piping from this point all the way over, I can just hover into this piece and hit tab and click. And you can see now I've selected all the main piping in that chase, just like that. So with it selected, I can now change the size. So maybe I change it to inch and a half, something like that. I could change it to one inch, just like that. So that's how you change the sizes of the piping. And then we'd obviously might want to change the size here. So let's just select all that. And then we could maybe change this to one inch as well. Let's keep this two inches because, you know, just for sake of demonstration.

All right, so we have our domestic water connections created. And so there's also a sink way over here. So I'd like to create that as well. So anytime you have an elbow, what you can do is you can click on the elbow and you can click this plus right here, or in a floor plan, you can click the plus right here. And what that will do is it will create a T and that's what we want. And now we wanna keep drawing piping off in the north direction and we wanna connect it into our fixture. So let's first place our fixture. Now this time I'm gonna show you guys a different technique. This fixture is a double sink and so it requires a lot more piping for the sanitary. So what I'd like to do is just drag in a group that I've already created.

So I'm going to expand groups down here. We're to go to model groups and you can see I have this P sync double. We'll click on it once and then we'll drag it into our project. I'll hit cancel there. And then we'll click. And then you can see if I hit escape, we have this model group that's already been piped up for us. So let's zoom out and take a look at it. Here it is right here. And so we have this model group which looks great and everything has already been piped up for us. So now I want to rotate it. I'm going to click on it. I'm going to click the rotate command. First we're going to set where it's going to rotate about. So we can hit place here and then we can select this midpoint right here. And then what we do is we just go to a point right here.

You can also set it at an angle, but I'm just gonna do it visually or click here and then we're just gonna rotate it. And you can see Revit will tell us what the rotate angle is. We can also type in a number and we can edit this. So if I hit 90, you can see I can rotate it 90 degrees about that angle. So this looks good. And now that it's rotated, I'm going to place it. So I'm gonna gonna use the move command and we're gonna place this point right in the wall. So let's select the midpoint of this wall, or maybe let's select this point right here first. And then what we can do is we can kind of move it into the wall. I can kind of just nudge it by using my arrow keys.

So I'm arrowing over to the right. And if I wanna arrow over more, if I hold shift and arrow over, you can see I make bigger moves. So I'm gonna arrow it right into the wall about right here. So that looks good. And right now it's a group, So I don't have access to like modify any of the piping. So what I'd like to do is ungroup it. If I click on it, you can see over here in the contextual ribbon, I can ungroup this. And then now I have access to all the pieces of pipe. I could move this piece of pipe over. So I'm going to move it over here and we're going to go out a 45 degree angle for the vent piping.

And then we can also move the sanitary. If we just click on it right here, we can drag it over and do something like this. So that looks pretty good. So now I'm gonna make those water connections and I can use my trim extend command or but I have to start drawing some piping. So I wanna start drawing some piping up. So if I click on that T and I right click the little grip, I can start drawing pipe by clicking draw pipe. I can set my diameter, let's use three quarter inch. And then let's just start going up. And the cool thing about Revit is it will actually snap to any common pipe elements. So if I go up, you can see it starts snapping.

And if I go over, it goes all the way over to there. And you can see we just made that connection. Now I was using three quarter inch piping. And so since this was only a half inch, I might wanna change the entire size. If I wanna change the entire size of this branch, I can do it pretty easily in Revit. So Revit, if you hit tab when you hover into piping, it will select the entire branch. So if I hit tab while I'm hovered in and click, you can see all of this branch piping has been selected. I can now change that to three quarter inch and I'm done. I can also select all the branch piping in the three d view. So if I hover into here and hit tab, you can see all the branch piping is now selected.

And I could change it up here like I just did. All right, so we have all of that done. And so that is it for the domestic water system. It's pretty much done. But now we need to do the hot water system. So to add hot water, we need a water heater. So let's go up to plumbing equipment, and you can see we already have this water heater in our project. If we hit the dropdown, we have one twenty gallon. We're going to go ahead and put it right here in the Water Service Room. I'm gonna hit escape twice, and now we have our water.

Now what we can do is while we've selected this water heater, if we hit space after the fact, we can go ahead and rotate it around. I'm gonna make the cold water on the bottom so that way I can go right into this and then with the hot water it's gonna come out here. So again, we can use connect into, but before we do that, we're going to go ahead and move this water here above the ground. Maybe we're gonna put it on a platform or something. So let's go ahead and select it and you can see we can change the elevation right here in the properties.

So maybe let's make the elevation seven feet. You can see the water heater moves up and I'm just checking to make sure I still have enough room to make my water connections. Then we could use connect into and we can use the first one, the cold water one and connect it right there. So we automatically did that. And then the next thing we might want to do is draw the water piping.

So I'm going to click on my water heater And we can also draw piping by clicking this create pipe icon, and it will automatically start drawing water piping. Now, when we go right off to the right, you'll see that Revit's going to yell at us. And the reason why is we need to make sure we have enough space for our elbow because we drew it right off the water here. So I'm gonna hit cancel there and let's try that again. Let's click our icon. And this time we need to move it up first. So you can see the middle elevation is basically right at that connection point. We need to move it up to something like 10 foot three. And we'll go over here and we'll click, and we can see that we've just made the water or the hot water. Now we need to go down to our lavatories.

So let's go right into here and we'll go like a little lower than the cold water, just right here for now. We'll click and we'll click over here just like that and hit escape. Now I can also move my water piping right here by just dragging it. And we're gonna drag it over to about a point right there. That looks pretty good. We can also use our arrow keys to nudge it. And then let's nudge this one up into that chase, just like that. Now let's go ahead and make those connections. So I want to use my connect into maybe, or you know what, I actually want to drop this down to two foot as well. And so to do that, we need to click on our pipe and we can't just change the elevation because we have an elbow right here.

So what I'm gonna need to do is delete this fitting, hit delete, and then change the elevation here. So let's change it to two feet And then we'll hit escape. And now we can trim extend these and it will make that connection. So I'm going to go to modify, trim extend, and we'll click on our two pipes. And you can see we've now made that connection down here. So now that we have our two foot pipe, we can drag it over. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna make the connections by just using pipe. So you can see that when we hover into this area, it kind of snaps to that reference plane and we can deselect. But unfortunately what it tries to do is pick the nearest connector and make a connection. And it looks really funky.

You can see it's like all messed up right here. So that's not what we want. So we're gonna control Z that. And this time what we can do is we can use the align command. So if I go up to align and we can align it to this reference plane right here. So I'll click this reference plane and then we'll click the edge of this pipe. You can see now we've aligned that perfectly. And now what we can do is we can select our fixture and use the connect into button. So we'll go up to connect into and we wanna use the horizontal hot water and click okay and make that connection. Now the reason I had to align it first was because I wanted that connection to be get made exactly like perpendicular right here.

If if I'd used you know, if I wasn't exactly at that, it wouldn't have done it like this. So that's why I did it. Now I'm gonna click this fixture and we're gonna go right into this piece of pipe the same way. Let's do it in a three d view this time. So I'm gonna hover around like this and we're gonna use this connector right here. It's the horizontal one. So I'm gonna use connect into, select horizontal hot water, and then go click this piece of pipe right here. Now you can see that we have some overlap right here, so we need to move these pipes. Luckily, if we click on our fixture, we have the ability to move the pipes. So you can see these little grips down here.

I can just simply move that over. And look, now my connections are spaced apart. So this looks great. So now we need to continue routing our hot water piping to our sink. This time, I wanna show you a different technique. What we're gonna do is we're just gonna start creating pipe by clicking the elbow. We're gonna click the plus to make a t. We're going to zoom out in our three d view. And I'm going to rotate around here so you guys can kind of get this orientation better. And what we'll do now is we'll just start drawing some pipe and we'll use our trim extend command.

So to draw some pipe, we can click on our T, right click the little grip, draw pipe, and we'll draw it up to a point right there. And then what I'll do is I'll use trim extend. So I'm gonna hit trim extend, click our pipe right here, and then let's click the pipe that was already created over here. You can see we've automatically made that connection, which looks great. Now this piece of pipe right here is three quarter inch, so we probably need to upsize this.

What we might wanna do is select all these pieces right here. Oh, you can see when I did that, I accidentally selected the background. So what I want you guys to always do is make sure that when you go down here, you can see like selection toggles. We always want select links off. And now when I try to make selections, you can see I'm only selecting the stuff that's in my model. So I'm gonna select these two pipes right here, and then we'll change the diameter to three quarter inch, just like that. And now that looks great. I'm going to zoom out. And then what we'll do is since this fixture is so far away, it's never going to get hot water. That's going to take a long time.

It might be less than 50 feet. So if you guys ever want to measure things, we can click the measure button right here or measure tool. And then I can measure from my water here. I'm going to make sure chain selected so we can do this. And we could just make a measurement. We want to make sure that this is over 50 feet. You can see it's way over 50 feet. It's about 100 feet away. Plus the 10 foot. So it's 96 feet.

So that's almost 100 feet. So we're going to need a recirc line. So to draw a recirc line, we simply can just draw it from maybe a point right here. So I'm going to click on this pipe and I'm going to use right click and say create similar. And the reason why I like to use create similar is it will put it on the same diameter, same elevation, and same system. However, we'd like to change the system. So we're going to change the system to HWR for hot water return or hot water recirculation. And then we can also change our elevation to something different. Maybe I could make it 10 foot six and hit enter. And then we can just simply click on our pipe right here and then go over.

Maybe I'll just go to a point about right here. And then I'm going to scroll over to the left and I can continue to go over just like this and go down. And I probably want to go maybe right into this area right here. Oops, I'm going to hit escape. I want to keep drawing piping from here and maybe I want to click it into this cold water piping right there. So let's take a look at that. You can see this pink piping, this is our hot water return, and that made that connection. So this is looking pretty good. And now I'd like to add a recirc pump to this hot water return line. So to do that, we'll go up to systems.

And this time we're going to use a pipe fitting. We're going to hit our type selector dropdown, and we're going to start typing in recirc. So you can see we have a recirc pump. Let's use this one right here. And then we'll click into our view and we'll go right here. And you can see now we have a little recirc pump and you can see it right here. Now one thing I'm also thinking about is since we have a recirc pump, we might want to also recirc these lavatories as well. So what we could do is we could probably drop down into this chase and then come back up with our hot water. So let's do that. I'm gonna show you how to do that.

I'm gonna click on this piping. We're gonna drag it out here to something like this. And then what we can do is we can if you wanna get go from a T to an elbow, we can click the minus button. You can see now we've gone to an elbow. And then we can basically, our main piping in our wall is right here. So let's rotate around to take a look at that. We want to turn this one into a T, so let's click plus. And then we want to continue drawing piping around here. So I'm going to go ahead and right click, create similar. We'll connect it right here.

And then we want to go up. So let's go up to 10 foot three. And then we're going to go out this way just like that. And then anytime I have piping that I want to connect right here, I can just select the piping I don't want anymore and hit delete. And then we can just use the trim extend command by going modify, trim extend, and clicking our pipes together. So now we've completely recirked the system. So you can see the hot water goes all the way down into the chase. It goes up and then goes over to our double sink. And then it's recirked all the way back to our water heater using a recirc pump. So now all the fixtures are gonna get hot water right away because we're always gonna have hot water circulating throughout this piping system.

So this is looking good. So that is it for our domestic water system. So next, we're going to go over the sanitary and vent system.