Your Design Journal entries this week should highlight your design thinking and process in modeling:
- your plumbing system elements
- your piping systems
- any special plumbing system challenges that you encountered and how you overcame them
My building features three single use restrooms on each floor each with one sink and one toilet. As they are single use, there is no need for urinals. They are located in the same place on each floor which allows for a more efficient piping system. The twelve-inch wall retains all four piping systems. For sustainability purposes, I decided to include a greywater recycling system. Instead of a sanitation pipe collecting the water from the sinks, a greywater collection pipe receives the water. Then, the water is routed to the toilets to become the water source for flushing, instead of clean, cold water. This greywater system allows for a reduction in water waste. In addition to the greywater system, there are sanitary pipes collecting the toilet water waste and hot and cold-water systems feeding to the sinks.
The biggest challenge I faced was fitting all the piping into the back wall. My architectural design first featured a 6.75” wall. This size wall was able to fit the hot, cold, and sanitary piping but unable to include a greywater pipe. This prompted me to go back to the architectural model and change the wall to be a 12” wall. This additional space was able to fit all four piping systems. Another challenge I faced was properly connecting all the fixtures to the pipes. In some cases, there was not enough space to allow for the connections, so I was constantly playing a game of readjustments until it all worked out.
