Exploring Plumbing Systems in Revit MEP: A Comprehensive Guide to Sample Project Model

Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for BIM 322 Revit MEP for plumbing. In the previous videos we went ahead and got our project file started, and what I want to go ahead and do now is kind of similar to what we did in the mechanical course, but I want to go ahead and take a break from our project model and let's look at a sample project to kind of go over some of the specifics of plumbing, some of the parameters, some of the items that are just really specific to the plumbing scope of work. So in newer versions of Revit, Autodesk has put together some great sample files that I highly recommend that you check it out.

We're going to take a look at the plumbing model here. So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to go over to my file and I'm going to go to open. Now where these are, they are installed when you install Revit.

So you can go ahead and you go to your local C drive. I'm going to go to my program files folder. I'm going to go to Autodesk.

I'm going to scroll down and find Revit. I'm using Revit 2025 on this. So let me use that, scroll down, find my samples folder, and this goes for any Revit version here.

If you're using 24, 23, it should be in this same location. Samples, and go ahead and find the Snowden Towers sample plumbing. So Snowden Tower samples plumbing.

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I'm going to go ahead and hit open. And we're going to take a look at some of the specifics with regards to plumbing in this file. It's going to take a little bit to open.

It is a very large file. It has a lot of links in here. All the disciplines are linked along with the architectural.

So it may take a little bit of time for you to open the file. I'm going to go ahead and just continue. It's kind of in a locked location so that you can't edit it.

I'm just going to go ahead and continue opening the file. It's a read-only file. So you can see here, it has a starting view.

The starting view kind of has a 3D view. This 3D view here is all of the, it seems like all of the different systems, but it's highlighting the plumbing systems being shown as kind of a non-halftone item. But there's a lot of information in this model, but we're going to be focusing on the plumbing aspects.

You have how to use this project. It kind of gives you a breakdown of all of this so that you can kind of take a look at it. So you can see we have different, our project browser is kind of squared away and our properties palette there.

To start, I'm going to go to my 3D view and I'm going to go here to my little house on the prairie. I'm going to go into my 3D view and just kind of start to look at things. The one thing I'm going to want to have to do is, this is really busy, right? There's a lot of files in here so you can see all the levels.

And this is going to give you an idea of what a developed Revit model that is being coordinated between multiple project teams, multiple disciplines may end up looking like. It can get a little wild. It can get a little crazy.

What we want to go ahead and do in this view is turn off all of our Revit links. So I'm going to go into my VV settings. I'm going to go over here to Revit links and I'm just going to select all of them and then just uncheck them and hit apply.

And I'm going to hit okay. And here we go. So you can kind of see, I have the entire plumbing system here and I'm going to go ahead and zoom in and you can kind of start to see it.

So there are some ductwork here and we'll kind of touch on that a little bit. We won't be doing any ductwork modeling in this class, but there is some ductwork here because that's how they determine the scope of work. But this kind of gives you a general overview of what the plumbing model kind of looks like.

So there's multiple systems here and those are kind of represented by the different colors. You can see here, I have kind of a water supply system coming in here and I'm going to turn on my thin lines also so that the line weights don't show, but you can see all these lines coming in here. And you may notice that these are just single lines and we'll talk about that here too.

We have some water systems, some water supply systems with the green is traditionally a sanitary system. Your blue is usually your cold water and cold water supply. You may see that I have a red line here also.

Obviously it's not red when I select it, it turns blue to show as it's selected, but you can see that I have that there. That's typically my hot water supply. In this particular instance, they've decided that plumbing is going to model the exhaust vents for the water heaters.

So they do have tankless water heaters in this model and they have determined in this scope of work, I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. I would typically coordinate that with mechanical, but they have those modeled in here for the duct work for the tankless water heaters. You can see we have different fittings.

This seems to be a water connection that they've modeled some of the pipe into with a P-trap. And we'll kind of talk about a few of these items. What else do we got here? We have all these different kind of traps, these different sink connections.

Some of these are kind of modeling practices. We can create a family like this, that is the sink connection with the P-trap integrated that you can see there. Let's see here, we have some floor drains or some shower drains got tying into that sanitary system.

Another system that we have up here is our roof drain system. So you can see we have the roof drain and then that comes down and ties into a pipe. So one thing you're probably looking at this is like, let's look at this guy specifically for this roof drain.

You may see that we have like a full width pipe here, but we're showing only a single line in this instance. Well, the thing about that what's happening is, is depending upon the detail

level, pipes and fittings represent differently. And this is so that you can use it to create your own different types of views, single line diagrams, that kind of thing.

So right now, this view is set to a medium detail level. Well, at a medium detail level, Revit does not show the full pipe size. If I select this guy, I can see that the pipe is actually a six inch diameter pipe, but I'm only seeing the single line or the center line of that element.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to change this to a fine detail level, and you'll see that the entire pipe is now being represented the same with all these little guys. I'm seeing the pipe, I'm seeing the fittings, and this is just the nature of the plumbing scope of work. So a lot of times when we're working and we're modeling, we use a fine detail level, but maybe sometimes for documentation purposes, and maybe we'll check on a couple of sheets here that we don't want to necessarily show the entirety of the, we don't need to show the entirety width of the pipe.

It's usually represented by a single line diagram. If I go down, let's say, let's go to my level zero, my P100 plan, level zero sanitary, you can see here that it makes it really nice that it's just a single line diagram. I can tag these pipes and we'll, and in our course, we'll get into tagging and all that kind of stuff, but it kind of keeps it a little cleaner, a little bit nicer.

We have different symbols. Let's go back to our 3D view here. What else, what else? So you can see that we have the different colors representing the different systems.

We'll be setting up a system of our own to go over. Revit does come preloaded with some of those systems. We have our plumbing fixtures that are loaded in there, the area drains.

You may notice that a lot of the fixtures that are showing are, maybe some of them are not actually showing AKA like the sinks. So the sink is actually part of the architectural model. In this instance, they have not actually modeled the sink.

I've typically seen it to where people will copy monitor a sink location to get the connections and everything. And we'll kind of go over a couple of different ways of doing it. But this is mainly focusing on the plumbing system and those elements.

If you want to take a moment, kind of orbit around, take a peek. There's a lot of information here and pipes are similar in ducts to ducts. If you are, if you're familiar with that.

If I select a pipe, let's look at the properties here. We have some constraints. We have the dimensions, what the system type is.

We have this set as domestic cold water, what the pipe segment is, what the diameter is, different flow aspects. But the other thing that we have here is we have this pipe type. We can set up different pipe types.

We have like, in this instance, we have cast iron, chilled water, copper, PVC, domestic waste vent, DWV, and standard. I can go ahead and hit edit type and let's take a look at some of this. So the reason why I say it's very similar to duct is because it has this routing preferences.

So here under routing preferences, if I hit edit, you can see under routing preferences, I can specify the types of segments. So I can specify what material is the pipe. Is it copper K rated L or M? Is it iron ductile? Is it PVC or polyvinyl chloride? You can have stainless steel and you could even define your own if you need to.

But most of the time, I think most people are pretty well covered with this list of types, pipe types. You could also limit your size if you needed to. If you knew that on your copper, you did not want to go anything larger than say a four inch copper line, you could say, hey, for this pipe type, I want my max size to be four inches.

Or if I had a minimum size, you know, let's say that I didn't want any, let's say I didn't want any copper lines under a half an inch. I can say, hey, I want my minimum size to be half an inch. You can set your elbows, your preferred junction types, T's, your junction, crosses, transitions, unions, flanges, and caps.

So there's a lot of settings there. Again, most offices may have the way that they go ahead and do that. Again, this is for the pipe type copper.

If I were to change my pipe type to say PVC DWV, and I go to edit routing preferences, you can see a lot of things have changed. Now I have schedule 40 PVC pipe. It has a PVC elbow bend.

It has a sanitary T junction, cross, reducer, coupling, so on and so forth. So there's a lot of things there that you may want to double check and take a peek at. Hit okay.

Hit okay. There we go. Let's go ahead and take a look at a couple of these other sheets that they've put together.

And let's see if we see anything specific here. So it's kind of pretty straightforward. They are showing some mechanical units.

We do have some other pipes here. Again, everything here is being shown at a detail level medium, which is giving us the single line diagram. And again, this is focusing only on the sanitary.

So you'll notice that I don't see any of the red lines or the blue lines representing my water supply. If I keep going down, I do have a domestic water plan here, and they may not have created all of them, but domestic water plan. And here we go.

So you can see now this is my domestic water plan showing all this. Now, obviously it kind of gets a little wild because all these pipes are kind of running over one another. But you can see I kind of have my main coming up here and then the water distributes out.

Some may continue to go up farther, but there it is. So take a look through some of these. You have these domestic water plan.

They also have some sections of the sanitary risers. Let's take a peek at these. So, interestingly enough, they have a different visual style here.

This is going to be a detail level of fine. So they have it set to fine, and then they have it set to shaded with edges, is the visual style that they're using. But you can see I'm also starting to see the slope.

So they actually tagged it in this location, but they did not tag it in the plan location, which is a little interesting to me. But you can see I have my slope piping here, and we'll talk about slope piping and how to create that. Slope piping is probably a, and I'm just going to give you a cautionary aspect of it, but it is possibly one of the more frustrating aspects of Revit.

There's definitely a workflow to go through to get slope piping to be useful and efficient. I think it's always useful, but to make it the most efficient way possible, there's definitely a workflow that we're going to talk about and go through. So you can see that we have the different sections here for the different sanitary risers.

Notice that they are not, they're doing this specifically for sanitary risers. So they're not showing any of the hot and cold water lines, just as a side note. You notice the connection here between here and here.

This isn't turning green. We'll talk about the connectors. We'll talk about how they work and go from there.

So take a few minutes, kind of poke around this. It's a pretty good model that Autodesk has put together here, and I think it kind of talks well to the basics of what we want to go ahead and do. We're going to change up some of the workflows in our aspect, but looking forward to it.

So take some time, take a peek, and then I'll see you in the next video.