Modeling Slope Piping for Sanitary System - Step by Step Guide

In the previous video, we kind of talked about sloped piping and everything for a little bit. And in this video, we're going to actually go ahead and get into modeling some of our sloped piping.

We're going to start at our farthest point at the highest elevation we can be. We're going to wind around a bit.

It's going to be a very simple system, but we're going to go ahead and come straight down this corridor, and then we're going to come over and up. And then we'll just come straight out. That's going to be our main; we'll be breaking off into these individual restrooms and everything when we need to.

But again, what we'll do is we'll start here, come over, go underneath the gym, up through there, and then come straight out. Okay. So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to go to my systems tab.

Make sure you're under systems. I'm going to choose pipe. We're going to make this starting pipe a four-inch pipe. We'll probably segment it and split it as we go ahead. Obviously, there's going to be some upsizing some of these pipes.

So I'm going to go ahead and start it off at, let's say negative—oh, we're going to say our floor slab. The lowest point we want to be is going to be negative one foot.

Let's just go with that. We're going to start here at negative one foot. Our slope direction—we're going to slope down because we're starting at the farthest connection point.

My slope value will be an eighth-inch per foot. That's because we're starting with a four-inch diameter pipe. And all I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to kind of start—I can go ahead and start here, kind of in line with this fixture.

I'm going to pick and I'm going to start dragging. Make sure your system type is set to sanitary and that your pipe type is set to PVC DWV. Okay.

So again, pipe type PVC DWV, system type sanitary. There we go. We're negative one foot for our middle elevation.

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We're sloping down at an eighth-inch per foot. There we go. I'm going to pick.

I'm going to drag. Here we go. Keep coming here.

We'll kind of come underneath the gym. We'll get closer to that mechanical room.

We'll come over, drag down, keep going, keep going, keep going. And then we'll go out here and we will figure out where that point of connection is later. I'm going to hit escape, and there we go.

Now we have this sloped main running all the way down. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to probably take one off of here coming up to this stack.

So I can start to build out for these. I'm going to come and do the same thing here, come over, and then we'll have another long one coming down. Now, the one thing that you want to think about, though, is how is this all going to connect? Obviously, this pipe up here is at negative one foot.

We get to negative three feet down here, which is pretty low. And what are we at our point of connection? We're at negative four feet, 11 inches, which actually isn't terrible. We could probably work that out with civil—negative five feet for our point of connection. Depending upon where the sewer manhole is and all that kind of stuff, we may have to redo some stuff out here, but that's something more for civil coordination.

We're kind of saying, "Hey, this is our point that we have to be at." Splitting the system and everything to get a higher elevation out here may be tough, so we kind of have to look at that. But what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to select pipe again.

I want to change that middle elevation to be negative one foot. I'm going to start at the same spot up here.

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I don't need to start—I could technically start it from here and slope up, but I want to reduce the amount of trenching I have. So I'm going to end up starting here, like at this height, and go from there.

So I'm going to go negative one foot. We'll go here. Drag down again.

I want to slope down an eighth-inch per foot. We're starting with a four-inch pipe. There we go.

And let's see what happens when we try to automatically connect this. So I'm just going to come here and click and see what it does. And we can look at it in 3D.

Let's see here. I'm going to go ahead and look at my section box. And it was able to put in a small vertical piece that actually fit. Now, in the field, we may not actually want to install it like that. You know how these bends work for sanitary lines.

So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to adjust that a little bit. I'm going to grab my working section here. Bring it over.

I'm going to double-click into that. Let's go underground here so I can see everything. I'm going to delete my fitting.