Installing Ductwork for Kitchen Hood: Exhaust Fan and Makeup Air Unit Placement Guide

In the previous videos, we went ahead and built the family that created our kitchen hood here. And in this next few videos, we're going to go ahead and get this guy ducted in and put in some other elements to go along with it. Particularly with the exhaust, we'll put another exhaust fan in and then with the makeup air, we'll put another makeup air in.

Or I'll put a makeup air unit to go with that and we'll load that from a manufacturer that we have provided to you. So what we want to go ahead and do is we want to first kind of figure out where is the roof on this thing. So I'm going to bring this up.

So you can see our roof is fairly high. Obviously, this is a kitchen. So, you know, we would possibly mention to the architect, hey, we probably want to have a, you know, some sort of the wall going all the way to the roof, but then we can figure that out later.

That's just a coordination item with the architect. But what we want to go ahead and do is we can see here we have, when we built this family, we put together an exhaust or an exhaust connector and a supply connector. So I can create these here in section.

If I click and I drag straight up. Now you may notice that my width is wider than my actual connector. And that's just because width here is 18.

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And when I'm looking at width, width is parallel with my view. The height is perpendicular to my view. Now it will put all the fittings and everything here for me to go ahead and when I click, you notice it put all the fittings.

But what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to undo that. I'm going to go ahead, click my exhaust connector again, and I'm just going to come up here and I'm going to switch this. So instead of it being 18 × 10, I'm going to change it to 10 × 18.

There we go. I'm going to come up and I'm not going to worry too much exactly about where I'm going right now. I'm just going to go ahead and bring it up and then we can adjust it later on.

I'm going to do the same thing with the supply. So I come here to my supply. I'm going to click on that to create the supply duct again.

I want to switch my width and my height. My width is parallel with my view here. My height is going into my monitor.

So I'm going to change this to six by 18. There we go. I'm going to come up and do the same kind of idea here.

Now we have to remember that when we're drawing ducks in this fashion, we need to make sure that we're paying attention to what it looks like in 3D. So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to select this guy here. I'm going to use, I've used this tool all the time, but I'm going to go up here under my modify tab, under view, there's selection box.

And what this will do in the video shows you is it's going to create a selection box or a section box in 3D over that element. So check this out. So I'm going to click here on selection box.

There we go. I'm going to zoom in. Sometimes you need to zoom in.

I'll zoom all the way out, but I can see my two ducks here. I can adjust the section box by selecting it and clicking it up and dragging it. And I'm going to take it all the way through the roof.

And there we go. So in this instance, what I'm going to actually end up doing is I'm going to go ahead and bring these straight through the roof and it didn't want to move there. See how it wants to move me in that one direction.

It's kind of, I don't want to adjust that. So maybe we need to go back and do it in section. I want to just bring these up through the roof and just kind of see what's going on.

There we go. I'm actually going to align them. Notice how it kind of snapped to align to the center line of that duct by looking at in 3D.

I know that these are not in plane together, but what we're going to have to end up doing is figuring out where do we want the exhaust vent duct to be. And we might just end up putting the fan right where this is on the roof. And then we'll put the makeup air unit farther away.

There are code requirements debating or dictating how close exhausts can be to intakes. So the blue here, the blue duct you see is our makeup area unit, and that's going to be an intake or a supply. And then the exhaust here is obviously going to be a discharge.

We want to make sure that those are far enough away from one another. We already have an exhaust family in here for the exhaust fan. We're just going to use the same one.

So I'm going to go to my roof plan. I'm going to go to my level three working roof. Here we go.

And I can't quite see what's happening down here. So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to change my view range and I'm going to go all the way to level one. So I'm changing my view depth to be level one.

I hit apply. I hit okay. And there we go.

I can start to see what is happening down here. This is set to wireframe at the current time. So I'm seeing all the walls and everything.

If I were to set this back to hidden line, you would see I have a little bit better view of what is actually a roof. So I'm going to bring in my exhaust fan. So under insert, it's already loaded into my project.

So I'm actually going to go to my systems tab. And then I'm going to go mechanical equipment. I have my kitchen hood here, which is the hood that we built.

But I'm going to find the, let's see here. Exhaust. There we go.

The exhaust ventilator downblast. That's fine. There we go.

And I'm going to go ahead and kind of place it just kind of in line and we'll look at it in 3D and get it in the right place. Pick there. There we go.

We know that this has a different connector and in the ceiling space, these will go ahead and join and then connect. So let's go back to my section here and let's look at this guy. Well, it looks like my exhaust fan is pretty high up.

So I can see here that it's pretty high up. I can go ahead and move it down. I could use the align command.

It's not wanting to let me align. Interesting. That's fine.

I'm just going to go ahead and go move. And I bring this guy down. And there we go.

What I also want to go ahead and do is let's see, let's see if I can set a dimension. There we go. I'm going to set it up because it's probably going to most likely be on a curb and make sure I get the correct reference.

There we are. And we're going to move this up maybe a foot. So it's about one foot six.

Sometimes depending on the reference that you get, when you select an element, it won't allow you to move it. I could move this back down by five sixteenths. So zero space, zero space, five over one six or five over one six.

And what's probably ending up happening here is, is that this roof is probably sloping away from me. So it's kind of messing with the, the options a little bit. I'm going to create a duct out of this here.

So what I can do is I can click on that here. I'm going to pull this down, drag down and place. Now that 15 × 15 is probably going to want to carry through the actual roof assembly.

And then we'll transfer it when we get into here. What I'm going to end up doing now is I'm going to align. And let's see, it's not giving me the center line.

If I go VV, I'm going to go down to duct. So I can see the center line here. So my center line is on.

And what's happening is my section is not cutting my ducts. So since my section is set to hidden line, I'm gonna change just a wire frame. Sometimes it takes a little bit to figure out exactly what you need to change.

I'm going to AL for a line, pick my center line here and pick the center line here. And there we go. Another way of doing this is if I was in my 3D view, I could switch this to wire frame and notice how I can start to see my center lines here.

I could use the same align command in 3D. If I go AL, it's going to align it in both X and Y. If these weren't aligned already in one direction, it would actually align it in 3D. So a lot of times I'll do this, align, pick here, pick here.

And there we go. For these elements, I don't need the fittings or anything. So what I'm going to end up doing now, let's go back to our section I just deleted.

So I deleted the fitting and that because we're going to have this, this, this fan be straight up and down. I'm going to go ahead, drag this down and let's see if it wants to connect. Boom.

It connected. I could also do that in 3D if I wanted to, or have those deleted. I can drag this down and see how I'm getting that little connector there.

Let go. It automatically puts the fitting in for the transfer to change the size and we're good to go. Now you could decide to move this.

If you wanted to, you could say, Hey, I want this to be until I get above the ceiling so I can grab that fitting and slide it down. I'm actually going to slide it a little bit closer to the roof. And there we are.

We've put in our exhaust fan. Now to make, put our little makeup air unit here. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is now we've provided you a family for that.

So I'm gonna switch to my roof fan. Now we need to make sure that our makeup air unit is at least 10 feet away, a 10 foot radius circle away from this exhaust fan. So I'm going to go ahead and grab this.

I'm going to drag this out. Let's just go 10 feet. And then there we go.

So what I want to go ahead and do now is I'm going to go to my insert tab. I'm going to go to load family because this is not an Autodesk family, but I'm going to load family. I'm going to go to my documents where, or wherever you may have that VDCI folder and then file downloads for the course.

You under families and references, you'll see this KSQLOD200 all sizes. And what this is, this is from a manufacturer and it's going to have what we call a lookup table. So a lot of times I'm going to go ahead and hit open.

There we go. And so you can see it's brought up this specific table. Now what happens is there's a text file that is associated with this, with this family file.

And it says, the family says, when you're loading in, look at this lookup file. And this has all the different parameters. So you can see this is made by Greenhack.

It gives you all this different information that is put in there. Let's go ahead and select, oh, I want to take the KSQ16BIBD. I'm going to go ahead and hit okay.

It's going to upgrade it from a previous version, which is perfectly fine. Now I've just loaded that into my project, but now I want to go ahead and use it. So I'm going under systems.

I'm going to go to mechanical equipment. And there we are. You can see I have this guy here.

Let's go ahead and place it. I want to place it in line with my duct here. Pick, and there we go.

Let's take a look at it in 3D. Well, we got to slide out our section box here and we have some more information. So this is their little family that they've created.

If I select on it, you'll see that it has this duct that comes out the bottom. We can actually bring our, we'll bring our duct back down into the building and then come up and out, but we had to move it over to allow for that distance. So I'm going to go ahead and create a duct and I'm going to go, it's not wanting to be nice.

So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to do this in section. Sometimes just depending upon the view, it's a little bit easier to do. So I'm going to go back to my section view.

Let's go ahead and extend it out so I can see what I'm working on. Let's take this down. There we go.

So sometimes in the 3D view, it doesn't really necessarily want to work. What I can go ahead and do is I'm going to do this. There we go.

Just drag it straight down. I'm going to bring this guy back into here. And then since I knew that they were already aligned, because I aligned them in plan, I could just trim this here.

Now this may not necessarily be how I want the fittings to be. This is an auto-generated and this transfer inside of the roof structure really isn't a option. What I could do is I could just grab both of these and I could drag them farther down if I so wanted, but maybe I wanted to have the transfer happen here in the horizontal.

So let me go ahead and I'm going to back up. What I can go ahead and do is I'm going to select this, right click, draw duct. I'm going to drag this over.

So I put the fitting in here and then this guy here, I can go ahead and get it centered. So I can drag, or I could use the align tool, AL for align, pick here to here. Then I could just drag this guy back and tie it in.

Now that kind of gives me a big fitting like this. Maybe I don't want to have, maybe I want to have say the bottom edge or the top edge aligned and then my transition is only happening in one direction. So I could do that too.

So let's go back. I'm going to go ahead and bring this guy back. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to align this so that the bottom edge here and the bottom edge here line up.

If I pick here, then here, what I'm going to go ahead and do here is I'm going to drag this over and do that. Notice how the fitting looks different from what I did previously. You can see here, this is now consistent elevation along the bottom, which is kind of what you'd probably want for an installation purpose so that all of my hangers can be the same exact height.

And then my transition is actually happening up here along the top. Perfect. I'm maybe play with it a little bit, you know, get it up to where you want it to be.

This is a perfectly fine elevation for this guy here. We can double check that. Let's take a look and see here the blue lines that you do see.

So this guy, maybe they want to go ahead and move it down 13 16ths of an inch. So zero space, zero space, one three over one six. There it is.

So I know that they're both one foot six. And there we are. I will say the blue lines that you do see here, these are clearance lines that have been inputted by the manufacturer.

So those are a usable item there to help coordinate and make sure that nothing is going to be clashing maybe with maintenance access or anything like that. Let's take a look at our 3D here. I'm going to turn it back to hidden line because I kind of like to be able to see it like that.

And there we go. You can see we've created the duck system for our kitchen hut. Great.

I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here and the next one we'll start finishing up. See them