Tag Archives: Routed Systems

Open Design Project Status Report – BIM Eco Cottage

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PEX Water LinesSorry for the limited posts lately, but I’ve been bogged down somewhat with the design of the Small BIM Eco Cottage, job searching, etc. The latest work on the Eco Cottage is the routing of PEX water lines.

The image to the right shows a close-up of the PEX cold water lines I am currently routing at a location near the manifold (click). Routing flexible lines such as this in Inventor is pretty is fairly simple. You place the fixtures or targets at beginning and end of the run, then place mounts and /or targets along the route between the two, then connect the dots with a 3D sketch.

In this case, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single part as a BIM object, so I have to model them as I go. The image below shows the copper PEX manifold for the cold water. I modeled it as an iLogic part that can have between 2 and 24 ports with several manifold sizes, line sizes, and the choice of hot or cold (red or blue lines) configuration.  

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A copper PEX Manifold

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Creating a Routed System with Vanilla Autodesk Inventor

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For this series of articles, the Routed System of choice will be your average everyday home plumbing. The DWV (drain, waste, and vent) system to be exact.  

The DWV layout I am using as an example is for is for a little eco cottage design that has all of the mechanicals running through chases and partition walls to keep the thermal envelope as intact as possible — but the technique will work on any design equally well. Also of note is that the design has a FPSF (frost Protected Shallow Foundation) slab……which means there is only one chance to get things right.

The Penetrations

The penetration drawing is a plan view sketch that shows where the various pipes pass through the structure at whatever level is represented. It is created  as the first sketch in a part file located in the overall plumbing assembly. This is a hold-over from ship design days, but it works on houses as well.  

For this particular house, you can see that the stack and vents run up a 2” x 6” partition wall. There is a wet vent at the other end of the wall as well, but is not shown. All of these penetrations run down the center of the wall, and can be drawn on the same plane, which is where I started.

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