Thursday, May 30, 2013

One Minute with a Pipe Trap

Placing a pipe trap can be counter-intuitive or maybe just awkward until you "know how". The pipe trap family is built with the origin at the vertical or riser connection. That means you need to attach it to the bottom of a riser, the bottom of the pipe that is leaving a sink for example. Want to watch? It's just about a minute...



If you'd like to avoid placing pipe traps entirely you can consider incorporating them into plumbing fixture families that use them. Just do all the subtle plumbing work under the counter in the family and put the connectors at the wall face. I wrote a post that discusses the concept of rough-in families if you're interested. These are the links:

First mention of Rough-in Families
Follow Up Post

3 comments:

Alfredo Medina said...

Hi, Steve. Another option, apart from including the p-trap in the family or placing the p-trap manually, is to let Revit make the connection automatically with an elbow and then convert the elbow into a p-trap. The elbow family must be set to "multi-port" and the p-trap family must be loaded in advance for this trick to work. There is some more info in this blog article: http://planta1.com/forum/entry.php?30-How-to-deal-with-the-P-trap-in-Revit-MEP

Steve said...

Yes the change the fitting type trick is another way to approach dealing with the "fiddly bits" under the counter.

If there is someone in the firm comfortable with embedded these in families then it avoids the whole "put a trap in" effort.

At least we have options!

Anonymous said...

We've considered placing P-Traps within our fixture families at our firm, and even tried using families with the traps nested. What we found is more often than not; the depth of the trap will have to vary from one fixture to the next, as well as the rotation. Though it may be a little more work; we've found it better to place the trap as we pipe up the fixtures this way they can be configured as each scenario mandates.