Explore the process of successfully connecting drinking fountains and other plumbing fixtures using the Revit MEP platform within the BIM 321 course. Familiarize yourself with practical techniques such as creating, aligning and adjusting pipes, using connectors, and working with the plan view and section view.
Key Insights:
- The Revit MEP platform on BIM 321 allows users to create pipes and adjust them to align with plumbing fixtures such as drinking fountains. It involves selecting the appropriate connector and dragging it to the right location.
- Working within the plan view, you can manipulate the orientation and location of connectors and pipes. Moreover, using the section view, potential issues with the alignment of fixtures can be identified and dealt with by rotating the section, for instance, by 90 degrees.
- The Revit MEP platform provides tools for fine-tuning the alignment and connections of the pipes. Users can make necessary adjustments, such as moving connections back, changing the diameter of pipes, and adding bends to pipes, to ensure an efficient layout and proper installment.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 321 course, Introduction to Rev MEP. In the previous video, we went ahead and actually got our entire second floor bathroom all dialed in with the water supply piping. So for right now, I want to go ahead and actually start getting the drinking fountains connected.
So I'm going to go ahead and start my plan view because the drinking water is going to come directly out of the back of these. So I'm going to select my drinking fountain and again, these little connectors here, you got to kind of watch where you're putting them because they kind of stack up a little bit. We're not really watching, you got to just kind of find them a little bit.
So as you can see, I have a 3 8th inch in here, I'm going to go ahead and take this guy and I'm going to click create pipe and I'm going to go ahead and drag it straight out and there we go there. I'm going to go ahead here, go 3 8th, that 3 8th in there, bring that out and what we're going to do with these drinking fountains is going to go ahead and run them in the wall and then connect them in here. So I'm going to go ahead and bring this out and I'm going to tie these two in together as such and there we are.
We can definitely do that in the field, I'm going to hit escape and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to center this in the wall just a little bit more as such. Let's go ahead and take a quick look at this in section. One thing I can see that might be an issue right now is that this is not going to tie in directly because these aren't exactly in line.
So I'm going to go ahead and take my section, I'm going to rotate the section by 90 degrees, here we are and let's go ahead and take a look here and see what's going on. I don't really want to see my hot water pipe right now because obviously we're not supplying hot water to these so I'm going to go ahead and suck the view of the section back just a little bit so I can see just the cold water. And there we are.
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So there's a couple of different things that we can do. I'm going to go ahead, I'm actually going to take this, I'm going to suck it back just a little bit, I'm going to do a right click and draw a pipe and I'm going to go ahead and angle this out and then angle it back over. One thing I do want to go ahead and do is I want to align it to the center line of this pipe so then I can drag it in to make sure everything is going to fit.
So I'm going to go ahead and go AL for align and I'm going to hover and find the center point. Now, right now the center line isn't being shown because it's turned off in our VV. So I'm going to go ahead and just go VV real quick.
I'm going to scroll down and find my piping or pipes and then I'm going to make sure my center line is on, hit apply and hit okay. Now you can see that my center lines have shown up. I'm going to go ahead and go AL, AL, find the center line of the pipe, grab this and align it there.
I'm just going to go ahead and bring this, drag it in and what it's saying is there's not enough room to place the required fittings and partially that's because this pipe is so big or this pipe is so small so we need a very large fitting to tie into this. So let's see if we can get this to work. I'm going to go ahead and drag a window over this and I'm going to move this connection back.
I could also move this connection back so we can run it directly against the wall and again it just takes a little bit of adjustment to get this all to tie in. So let's see if that's going to work now. Drag it over, pop it in and as you can see that works just fine now because of the fact that we made room for the actual fittings.
If we want to be a little bit more efficient, maybe change some more things around, I could always go back, move these connections. Again I'm just using the directional arrows and there we are. Now we've gone ahead and tied in our water fountains.
Let's go ahead and we've completed the entire second floor. Let's go ahead and go to the first floor and tie that in there. So I'm going to go ahead and go to my first floor plan under my plumbing.
There it is and as you can see we haven't tied anything in here yet. Our section is still being shown because our section here is cutting through both floors, both level 1 and level 2. So I'm going to go ahead, I can close our floor plan 2 here and then I'm going to go WT to bring those both up together. Since we're already in the correct view to do these water fountains or the drinking fountains, let's go ahead and do those first.
So I'm going to zoom in here and do the same kind of process. Take here, grab my 3 eighths inch in, bring it over, there we go. I'm going to grab here, bring my 3 eighths inch in.
I'm going to go ahead and bring it over and bring it down. Now in the second floor plan, if we look here, the water fountain supply lines were right in line here. This one we're going to have to tap it up a little bit.
So it's going to come in and then run up but what we could actually do is expand this fitting here to bring another pipe farther down. So I'm going to go ahead and select the fitting here. I'm going to go ahead and hit the plus sign on the bottom, select it here and that's going to allow me to draw my pipe straight down.
I'm going to go ahead and do a right click, go draw pipe and I'm going to go ahead and reduce the diameter. We don't necessarily need a 4 inch pipe going all the way down to here. So I'm going to go ahead and let's go ahead and change it to a 1 inch pipe.
There we go. I'm just going to go ahead and bring it down and we can always trim it up later and there we go. I need to kind of angle this guy over a little bit again so I'm going to select here, do a right click, draw pipe and as you can see I'm getting a snap there which is going to be very helpful.
So I'm going to use that snap, pick, drag over, there we are and then I can go ahead in my section view, I can go ahead, trim, TR, pick here and here and there we go. That's awesome. Now one of the things you may notice is that this pipe is a little bit farther off the wall than we probably like.
It's going to make this pipe a little bit harder to install. So I'm going to put a bend in it to actually go ahead and get that pipe closer to the wall. To put a bend in a pipe, I'm not actually going to delete the pipe but I'm going to split the pipe and then create a type of bend.
So check this out. I'm going to go SL for split or for slice, pick here and I'm going to pick about here. You don't have to be perfectly exact with these.
Now if I just started to grab this piece and move it because it's still connected, it's not going to allow me to do that. So to create this split, it's going to be very similar to our duct. I'm going to select here.
I'm going to pull this down, pull this guy up. You can go ahead and remove these fittings, the connect, the couplings, select the both of those. I'm going to go ahead and grab this pipe, slide it back and then I'm going to take this and I'm going to angle it.
I'm going to find that angle of 45 degrees which is there and I can just trim it all together. TR for trim, pick here and here, pick here and here and then if I want to get this connection closer up here, I just select that. I'm going to go ahead, move it up and there we go.
So again, we just brought that closer. Now we want to go ahead and let's get ready to tie in all of our sinks together. Just like what we did on the second floor, we need to go ahead and create the tap outs.
So I'm going to go ahead and grab my section and I'm going to drag it just over here so I can see everything I need to and again, I have this small sliver right now, this small sliver cut and this is how we tend to work in Revit MEP is with these small sliver cuts so we can kind of control what we're seeing. I'm going to go ahead and just extend it out a little bit so I can see the entire sink. I'm going to go ahead and select the sink here and again the same thing that we did on the second floor.
Click on my end and bring it down. I'm going to go here, click on my end here, bring it down and I'm just going to line it up with my previous one. Here and down, here and down.
By the way, I'm hitting escape every single time that I finish. Let's go ahead and bring this section out just a little bit more so I can see all the toilets and everything. Coming here, remember this needs to hit go up.
I'm going to hit escape, escape, here, I'm going to go to my end, straight up, escape, escape, I'm going to go here, in, straight up, escape, escape. We've got one side done. Let's go ahead and do the other.
I'm going to take my section and I'm going to flip it. So I'm going to go RO for rotate, click here and I'm going to go 180 degrees this time. There we are, I'm going to go ahead, there we go.
So there's that. Bring this guy down again, pick here, I'm not going to go that far down, I don't need to go that far down. Here, here, here, I'm going to just keep hitting escape to end the command.
So pick, escape, it wants to keep drawing a pipe, I'm going to hit escape again. Come here, take my in, go up, come here, take my in, go up, come here, take my in, go up, and there we are. I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here.
What we've done is we've connected our other drinking fountains. We've also gone ahead and connected all of our information that we need with regard to our specific connections coming out of the different plumbing fixtures. In the next videos, we're going to go ahead and extend these lines out and connect everything together.
See you then.
