Connecting Sprinklers to Branch Lines in Revit: A Step-by-Step Guide

Okay, let's continue with connecting our sprinklers to our branch lines. So let's start over here in this area of the restroom. If we look at what's going on here right above, we have a piece of pipe that's one-and-a-quarter-inch, that's at 12 feet, and we notice that these sprinklers are connected with tees.

That's because this one-and-a-quarter-inch pipe is going to be our threaded pipe, and we'll typically use tees and threaded fittings for that size pipe. Anything larger, we're going to be using grooved pipe. Okay, so I'm going to take my main and drag this up a little more.

Now we're going to draw a piece of pipe here. Now, we've already gone to System and Pipe. We can also click on this piece and go to Copy, bring it down to about right here.

That's okay. Either side, that's fine. Okay, I'm going to drag this up a little more, and I'll go ahead and pull this into the piece here.

I'll click on my branch line, and since I'm in the Modify Pipes tab, I'll go ahead and cap this. Now, we want to make sure we're matching the pipe type we've already got here. If we click on this piece, we'll see it's on outlets, one-and-a-quarter-inch.

Okay, one-and-a-quarter-inch and outlets. We're good. Let's drag it and move past the sprinkler a little bit.

Now we've got to be able to connect this sprinkler to this over here. So there are a few ways we can do it. Fortunately, Revit has a Create Systems option, and later in the project, we'll look at how that might not be the best solution because you'll end up having to reroute pipe anyway.

So it's good to start with exactly what you want, but in some situations, we can use it to help speed things up. So let's click on this sprinkler here. This brings us to the Modify Sprinkler tab, and find this Connect Into button.

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We'll click this, and we'll click the centerline of this pipe here, and it looks like we're connected, but our pipe is much too close to the sprinkler. So what we can do is we can take the sprinkler and drag it, and we'll see that the connection will still maintain. So let's drag it back a little bit so we can see what's going on.

Okay, well that's pretty good, but if we look at this and compare it to this, we can see we're connecting with an outlet, but in this situation, we're connected with the tee. Now this has to do with some of our mechanical settings, so what we can do is let's go to Manage, and if you find this MEP Settings, Mechanical Settings, and here we can look at some of our pipe settings. If we go down to Conversions, our system classification, we are dealing with a wet fire protection system, so all of our pipe types are set to that. So let's go ahead and select that.

Now it's defaulting our branch lines and our mains to different pipe types. Our branch lines are tees and our mains are outlets. Now, Revit standard, without any of the fire sprinkler extensions, doesn't differentiate well between these types of pipes, as well as our arm overs.

We can mess with these settings, but sometimes we'll have to go back and forth, and it won't end up being in our favor most of the time. So here's what we can do. Let's go ahead and delete this fitting.

Let's go ahead and change this to tees, and now we're connected. But let's look at one more thing here. Again, this pipe here, we've talked about our own arm overs being one inch, but because our sprinklers have a half-inch orifice, it likes to think that it wants to connect to a half-inch sprinkler pipe, but that is not what we want.

We want to use one-inch pipe. So let's see what's going on here. Let's go ahead and create a section, just in this area, and pull back so we're looking only here.

Let's right-click, go to View. Let's set our detail level to Fine, and let's expand this out just a little bit. We'll move that out of the way.

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Sometimes you'll have to move your sections, and when we create our building sections, we'll start hiding some of these. But let's zoom in and see what's going on here. If we look at this on the left, this is the one that was already drawn into our project.

What we can see is our sprinkler. Here we have our transition piece, or our reducer, and here we have our one-inch pipe, and our one-inch pipe. What Revit likes to do automatically, again because of this half-inch outlet on the end of the sprinkler, is it likes to connect it to a piece of half-inch pipe.

We can change that. All we need to do is select it, and go to one inch, and now you see we have our reducer in place right there. Let's change this to one inch.

Okay, but unfortunately our fitting is still wrong, so we're going to have to go here and delete it. Now we can do this multiple ways. We can section this up, and we can drag this across over there.

Now this is the configuration that we want. Okay, so in the next video, we'll continue knowing the process the way Revit likes to think and how to use certain settings to get what we want as quickly as possible.