Explore the intricacies of setting up a water heater system in your architectural project, particularly focusing on the correct size of the connectors. This guide provides a detailed walkthrough on how to modify the diameter of connectors in your family and how to tie the water heaters into your overall system.
Key Insights
- When setting up a water heater system in an architectural project, the size of the connectors is a critical detail. If not correctly set, it can lead to issues like fittings at the connector when connecting pipes of different diameters.
- To modify the diameter of the connectors, one needs to select the instance and edit the family. The diameter of the connectors can be set to the desired value, for example, a one-inch diameter for the inlet and a one-and-a-half-inch diameter for the outlet.
- Once the connectors are correctly sized, they can be tied into the overall system by drawing pipes from the connectors and aligning them with the existing system. It's important to ensure the pipes and fittings are at the same elevation to enable automatic generation.
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In the previous video, we went ahead and built our family for our water heater, and we populated two of them. And if you select them, you might notice something kind of interesting.
And we actually forgot one little setting on our connector that we needed to do. You may notice that our in is 24 inches and our out is 24 inches. Well, this is going to create some issues.
So one thing we forgot to set in our family is the size of that connector, which is typically a fairly important thing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to this family and we're going to edit it again. So let's go back into the family.
So select one of those instances you populated, hit edit family at the top, you may still have the family open. And let's go into our 3D view here. So you can see that we forgot one quite little thing, this diameter dimension.
So the connectors, they can not only have a system and a flow direction, but they also have a size. So let's go ahead and I'm going to make this inlet, I'm going to make this actually like two or one inch there. And then I'm going to go ahead and make this like 1.5 inches, one and a half inches.
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So I have a one inch in and one and a half inch out. So again, we're setting the diameter of our connectors. So I'm gonna make this a one inch.
And I'm going to make this a one and a half inch zero space 1.5. Now you may get these sizes and everything from say a manufacturer cut sheet. That's traditionally where you would find these items. We're just kind of going and saying, hey, these are the size that we want right now.
We can always come back and adjust them later. So that's going to determine the size of connector. And if I don't set that size to what I have it coming in as, or if I change the size when the pipe, I'm going to get a transition or some kind of fitting on that pipe.
If I put, say, say I connect this, I've set this to be a one inch diameter. If I connect like say a three quarter inch pipe, or let's say a two inch pipe to this, what will end up happening is I'll have a fitting at that connector. Same thing here.
If this is a one and a half inch pipe, and I take this and I put it I put like say I put a two inch pipe coming out of it, I'm going to have a fitting here to make change that pipe size from the connector. I'm going to go ahead and look back into my project. I'm just going to go ahead and overwrite the existing version.
We didn't change any parameter values. So there we go. Now when I select it, you'll see I have a one and a half inch out and a one inch in.
So it's really simple and really straightforward to go ahead and do these. I can go ahead, just hover here, right click, draw pipe. And I'm going to go ahead and draw this out.
And there we go. Same thing here. Select here, click on the connector, right click, draw pipe, drag out, and I'm going to bring this one down.
And notice that it detected that those two were coming together. And there we go. I could even draw this and connect it here.
And it's going to draw in my vertical portion. So again, what I end up doing is I'm going to select this guy, right click, draw pipe, come out, align it with that hot water pipe, hit escape, because I want to go to this next one, right click, draw pipe, come out, come down, and I'm going to click on that connector. So let's take a look at this.
I'm going to my 3D view. Oops, that is a 3D view of my family. Let me go ahead and close these other views.
I no longer need my family open. You can go and save those changes. I'm going to go here to my little house on the prairie, as I like to call it.
I still have my scope box from earlier. So I'm going to go to my section box, undo it. Let's find our water heaters.
Here we go. So you can see what has ended up happening. Now, obviously, we want one and a half inch coming out of here.
But once we get to this point, I want to upgrade it to this other size. So this was a three inch pipe. I'm going to go ahead and select these pipes.
So these guys here, I can make them a three inch. And again, I need to adjust the fittings, I could just come into the fitting here, make this three, boom, come in here, make this three. And there we go.
And I might need to make and that should be fine. All looks pretty good. There we go.
Now we just need to go ahead and tie in the cold water. So in this instance, what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to go to my level one plumbing plan. I'm going to bring this guy down.
I know I have one inch end. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my systems. I'm going to go to pipe.
I'm going to set my pipe size to be one inch. I also want it to be domestic cold water. So make sure you set your system type here correctly.
And what I could do is I could say pick this intersection, drag over to that connector. Now, it's kind of giving me a weird thing. And part of that reason is, is because my height was wrong.
So I know that this pipe is at nine foot six. When I go to create this pipe, domestic cold water, one inch, I'm going to make the middle elevation here, nine foot six. I can either change it here for middle elevation there, or I can change it up here.
Either one works. So I'm going to start at the center line of that pipe, come over, go down. And it's wanting to be a little testy.
Let's see. Maybe if I start there, come out. Nope.
There was not enough room to place the required fittings. We might have that pipe a little too far too close. Let's try this.
Try this out and place it. So what's happening is because we're reducing in size so much, you notice it doesn't have enough room to put the elbow in there. So this is kind of one of those things that we might have to make a slight adjustment.
I'm going to go ahead and bring my pipe back. I'm going to go ahead and actually angle it off a little bit, draw a pipe. I'm going to bring it down and then back over.
And actually we'll leave it like this for right now because we're going to change the size of it later on. Now I should be able to. So again, all I ended up doing was I brought it up because I have my point of connection, but this is where I want my water heaters.
And so to actually have this location work and where my point of connection is, I'm going to have to bring this pipe off just a little bit, draw a pipe, come down. There we go. And then from here, I'm going to go pipe.
I have nine foot six. I am going to do a one inch pipe from that and domestic cold water. So both from the center line here.
Let's see. Yep. There to there.
There we go. There to there. There we go.
Perfect. Now one thing you may have noticed is that my water heaters now returned to a black color state for the line. When I had previously connected just the hot water, it tied it into that hot water system.
And that's why they became red. Now that I have both a cold water and a hot water attached, it wants to go ahead and do that and make this just a black line rather than a red or a blue line. When you have one color connected to typical plumbing fixtures, it will also go ahead and actually color it the color of that system.
Great. I'm going to go and bring this down and I can actually. Now what I want to do is I want to tie it back to this.
Well, this pipe, I'm going to say, since I'm diverting some of the water here, I'm going to go ahead and make this a smaller pipe. So I'm going to make this change this portion to a three inch. And I want to go ahead and tie that back together.
So what I could do is I could use my align tool, AL, select the center line of the pipe, select the center line of the pipe here. And there we go. The thing is, though, they are not connected yet.
Even though I've aligned them, they don't automatically connect. So I just need to drag this down, drag it to the connector. And as long as they're at the same elevation or at an elevation to where the fittings and everything, it can automatically generate, it will do it for you.
Let's go ahead and take a peek at it in 3D. And there we go. We've tied in our water, our water heaters into our system, and we've tied in it all together.
Let's go ahead and stop this video here and the next one will continue on. See you then.
