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Derek Cutsinger/6 min read

Connecting Piping and Sprinklers in Classroom, Corridor, and Office Areas: Level 1 and Level 2 Reflected Ceiling Plans

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This tutorial walks through connecting piping and sprinklers in classroom, corridor, and office areas: level 1 and level 2 reflected ceiling plans, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

In this video, we'll begin to wrap up the piping and sprinklers in our classroom, corridor, and office areas around here and here. So let's begin and go to our Level 1 Reflected Ceiling Plan. Let's also open the Level 2 RCP.

Okay, so we'll start with Level 1. What we need to do is in these areas of the corridor, sprinklers, and the restroom—we have not populated them on Level 2 yet, so let's do so. Let's grab these, hold down CTRL, and grab the ones in the restroom as well. Okay.

Copy to Clipboard and go to our Level 2 Reflected Ceiling Plan. You can zoom in. As you can see, we do not have sprinklers there.

Now we'll go to Paste > Align to Current View. We got a notification that the origin does not lie on a host face. That’s expected.

So for our sprinklers, we need to make sure that we host them. Let's start here with these sprinklers, and go to the Schedule Level and select Level 2. Now it says these are at 10 feet, and the ones down here are at 15 feet. Let's make sure all of them are correct.

So I'm going to select all of these, go to my filter—I don't need to do that in this case—only Sprinklers are selected, and it says "Varies."

That means not all of them are at the right elevation. So I'm going to keep these selected. I'm also going to select these here. Let's go to Edit Work Plane, choose Pick a Plane, and let's choose this corridor ceiling.

Make sure it highlights, then go ahead and click, hit ENTER, and press Escape. So these are all at 15 feet, which matches what we have on the sprinklers that were already populated in the building when we started this project.

We'll take a closer look at what's going on here in a second. In the meantime, let's go to the restrooms—hold CTRL. Now here, there's a sprinkler right in the way.

What we'll have to do is—this is actually pinned right now. If you go down here and select Pinned Elements, uncheck that. It's still pinned.

We can go up to the ribbon, unpin it, and move it off to the side. Okay, after you do that, be sure to go back and pin it again. Also go back and mark this as a pinned element so that we cannot select it and move it around accidentally. Okay, let's go back to the restroom and set these to Level 2 at 9 feet—and these are at 9 feet as well.

Now let's go to our Level 1 piping plan, and open our Level 2 piping plan as well. Okay, we don’t need the section view. We have quite a few drawings open, so let's make more room for ourselves.

Back to the Level 1 piping plan. Now we brought in the sprinklers. Let's bring in these three branch lines and arm overs.

We'll drag over. I selected this, so I'm going to hold Shift and deselect that. Then hold CTRL and select the ones we need.

We already brought up the sprinklers, so we don’t need to do that again. Let's go to Filter and deselect Sprinklers. Hit OK.

Copy to Clipboard > go to our Level 2 piping plan > Paste > Align to Current View.

Okay, we brought these in. They are currently set to 12 feet.

These branch lines are set to 10 feet 6 inches, but let's take a look at what's going on here. If we go across, we can see that these are at 10 feet 6 inches. These others are at nearly 16 feet 4 inches. So there must be an elevation change.

If I look at my main here, this is at 10 feet 6 inches, and this piece is at almost 16 feet 4 inches—so there's a vertical pipe. We must have a higher ceiling elevation. So what we can do is create a section view.

We can grab the one we have here, pull this over to just before the full-height wall, and take a look. If we zoom in and pull this up a bit, we can see the main and the ceiling with our sprinklers. The branch lines we just copied from Level 1 are below the ceiling.

We don’t want to do that in a ceiling area. All of our piping should be above the ceiling and connect to the sprinklers at the ceiling level. There are a few ways we can handle this.

Let’s do it from our section view. Pull this main back near the full-height wall, right-click > Draw Pipe. We’ll draw up and over. You can see it connected with grooved couplings and elbows.

This is what we want based on our preferences, but we need to match the elevation of the main on the other side of the building. We can click on this pipe and use the drop-down to choose the existing elevation.

Let’s go back to our Level 2 piping plan.

We know we’re making our elevation change just before the wall. Let's drag our main all the way across. This is a bit of an awkward spot, so with this branch line, we’ll pull it back and keep it at 10 feet 6 inches. Change it to 10 feet 6 inches, right-click > Draw Pipe, go over and down.

Now these lines are currently below the ceiling, and we don’t want that. We can also get rid of this arm over piece here.

Select these two branch lines, and change them to 16 feet 3 inches. All right, click our main, go to Trim/Extend > Multiple Elements, select the main, then select the branch lines, and press Escape.

Now if we go back to our section view, we can see our branch lines are above the ceiling. What we need to do next is connect our arm over piping to our sprinklers.