Learn how to finalize a piping plan by ensuring all components are connected correctly and branch lines are capped. This detailed guide walks you through each step, demonstrating how to identify disconnected components, fix connections, and cap open ends.
Key Insights
- The tutorial begins with checking the entire piping system for any unconnected parts. This includes hovering over each pipe and selecting tab to ensure all components are connected.
- Unconnected components are not a major issue and can be quickly fixed. The next steps involve capping off certain branch lines, adjusting the level of some elements to the correct elevation, and deleting unnecessary detail lines.
- After these adjustments, the last action is to cap open ends of any pipes in the system. Once all these steps are completed, the piping plan is finished and ready for the next stages of the project.
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So in the last video, we nearly completed our piping plan, and in our 3D view we hovered over some pipe and selected Tab several times to see if our whole system was connected. Now if I zoom in, I can see a few pieces that were part of the plan when we opened our drawing at the beginning of the project. These are not connected. This is not going to be a big deal. So in this video, all we need to do is just fix some connections, cap a couple of branch lines, and our piping plan, initially, will be complete. So let's start off with our Level 2 piping plan, and we'll do the same thing here.
Let's hover over this main and hit TAB, Tab, and click. Okay, let's pan around. Now if you're seeing anything disconnected, now would be the time to make sure it is connected. If I look here, I need to connect this arm over, this one, this one. And I don't have any caps here again. This is part of the process—this happens. So this is just our cleanup step.
Okay, not too bad. And these areas here—okay, so let's jump in. So this was disconnected, and I could see there's no outlet. There's just a coupling.
So I'll delete that, and delete that. Go to our main, trim/extend multiple elements—the main and each branch line. Okay, that looks good. Then we had these areas here. So trim/extend single element. Now, I see in this case, I actually have some of these at the wrong elevation.
If my branch line is at 10'6", this should also be at 10'6", and I'll confirm those last two pieces. Whoop—12 feet, see what I did there. There are a lot of sprinklers and piping on a project like this, so it's bound to happen. And let's confirm that last one. Same thing. Okay. Double-check—hit TAB multiple times.
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Let's pan around. Okay, let's get rid of our detail lines. So I'm going to click on this one and go to Select All Instances > Visible in View just in case there's any more. I'm going to delete them. Now, some of these don't have caps.
So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start at the right and drag this way and Cap Open Ends. There we are. I'll do the same thing down here—start at the right, go to the left. Zoom in to see there are no caps, and Cap Open Ends. There we go. The piping that was originally in the project when we opened it should already be capped. We did these in our project, and we did these as well. Okay. When we go to annotate our plans, we will take care of the visibility over here. So let's not worry about this just for the time being. Okay, looks pretty good. Again, check your drawing. If it doesn't look exactly like mine, that's okay, but make sure everything is connected and that your sprinkler and piping are the correct sizes. And we'll confirm that more when we annotate our plans as well. Let's go to Level 1 and do the same thing.
I'll hover over this main and Tab, Tab, click. So it looks like we don't have some caps, and these pipes as well weren’t connected. How about in the Plan South area? Everything looks good here; we just need to cap. And over here, it looks like we need some sprinklers in this area. If we see this area of the building, we have a few uprights. So let's take care of that first. This will be very easy. Let's go ahead and select this, hold Control to get both of those armovers with the sprinklers, and let's type MM for our Mirror command. And let's find the midpoint of this wall here. And let's go check it out. Now we brought that in. That's good. All we need to do is set this to the middle of the main and connect it. Let's click on this sprinkler, connect into. All right, hover over the pipe and fittings, make it one inch. Okay, let's do our Tab, Tab.
It's all connected. Looks good. Just a couple of caps. This area should be okay. I didn’t do them down here.
So again, hover from right to left, Cap Open Ends. These must all have caps already because the option wasn't present. Okay. You'll also see the further you go into the project, small things here and there you'll find along the way that might happen to us as well, and we'll fix them as we come across them. But for now, our piping plan is complete. Now, in the next video, we’ll be bringing in the mechanical discipline and working on some coordination.
