Plumbing System Overview
For the plumbing system of the design, I tried to take advantage of using greywater systems to supply and collect water. Collecting graywater will help decrease overall water usage and therefore further meet sustainability strategies. Sometimes it was difficult to model because of the amount of coordination needed to make sure that pipes are not clashing and are on the correct planes, but I hope that more buildings will take advantage of this sustainability concept.
Plumbing System Elements
I have 4 bathrooms in my model, 2 on the first floor that are next to each other and share a wall, and 2 on the second floor that are across from each other in a hallway. Surprisingly, I found it easier to model the second floor bathroom, likely because they are smaller.
For my plumbing system I modeled:
- 1.6 gallon toilets spaced using the 3’ wide (and 5’ wide ADA) toilet partitions Revit library in the CEE 120B folder
- 3/4 flush urinals for 2 of the bathrooms
- Single public use sinks for the bathrooms
- 2 double sinks for the kitchen prep area
This image shows an overview of the bathrooms and kitchen area systems:
Piping Systems
For piping I used:
- Cold water 1.5” supply pipes for sinks
- Hot water 1.5” supply pipes for sinks
- Sanitary 4” collector pipes for the toilets and urinals using a slope of 8/12 inches
- Greywater 1.5” collector pipes for the sinks
- Greywater 4” supply pipes for the toilets and urinals
Additionally, I made changes to my architectural model so that I could include more wall space for the pipes. I added about 2’ of wall space to the faces that would connect to plumbing features. I wanted to make sure that pipes would not stick out of the walls. This image shows an example of the internal wall volume added:
Special Plumbing System Challenges Encountered
I encountered problems in coordinating pipes that are close to each other in terms of space. Even with the addition of wall space, I would still get clashes in my model. My pipes would often not connect and I had difficulty finding the right plane despite using the section views. For the sinks on the first floor that share a wall, I ended up creating 2 pipes to avoid the clashes I kept encountering. In the future, I would like to be more aware of how to minimize clashes and still optimize the use of space.
Integrated Models
Here are images of the integrated architectural and plumbing models:
First Floor Bathrooms:
Second Floor Bathrooms:
