Overall Strategy
My building has restrooms located on the ground floor, and the first floor, both for male and female guests. All 4 restrooms include accessible toilets stalls, conforming to the ADA ambulatory accessability requirements. To simplify my model, making it cheaper to both design, and build, the first floor restrooms were altered in the architectural design, in order to match the bathrooms below (albeit smaller sized). By having the restrooms aligned, it woudl allow for a simplified pipe system, with a main vertical ‘trunk’ servicing both male male bathrooms utilizing a branch system. The same design, is then mirror, in the female side. This can be seen depicted in the screenshots below:
Element Used:
- Toilets: Flush valve, wall mounted, 6.1Lpf
- Urinals: Urinal with Wing - Wall Hung, Standard
- Sinks: Lavatory - Wall Mounted, 20’’ x 18’’
Piping System:
The sanitary pipes are 108mm in diameter for the main branches and trunk, while the individual connections drop down to 88.9mm as suggested by Revit. The branches are sloped towards the main branch, allow for gravitational forces to clear the sanitary waste.
Standard domestic cold water copper pipes have been used, with a 28mm diameter throughout the system. As the hot water pipes only service the lavatories, and thus require less outlets, a smaller diameter of 15mm copper pipes was selected, in order to save on materials and offer a more sustainable solution.
The plumbing system is installed behind a partition wall, thus hiding the piping from sight. The gap between the partition and main wall allows for the installation and maintenance of these pipes, without having to re-drill or tear down permanent, load bearing walls.
Further Screenshots:
The folowing screenshots depict the different elements used, including stalls and urinal walls, as well as an example of the ground floor plan.
Challenges Faced:
Throughout my design, I faced 2 key challenges:
- Inefficient architectural layout: Only after delving deeper into restrooms and plumbing systems in exercise 10A, had it occured to me that my architectual design would lead to inefficient piping systems. The first floor restrooms were offset from the ground floor ones, meaning that two seperate piping sytems were required. By altering my designs, and lining up the restrooms, I was able to simplify the piping model.
- Connect Into Tool not working: Unlike in practice exercise, the ‘connect into’ tool did not work for me this time, for some unexplainable reason. However, I was able to manually draw and connect the pipes with the auto-sizing and lock-on snapping tools maknig the process a simple one. Utilizing custom sections of specific toilets, and shifting them along the wall as I worked helped.