Incorporating valves

- [Instructor] No piping system is complete without valves. The good thing about adding valves is we can add them to our pipe any time we feel like it. This video will have us going to our Tool palette to look for mechanical equipment. From there, we'll drill down to the Valves directory of the Fire Protection folder and add an relief valve and an alarm check valve. Open up our Valves drawing. Let's add some valves. I'm gonna come up to this area. In my Workspace Switching, I want to make sure I'm set to Piping. I'm gonna go to my Equipment tab and click on Mechanical Equipment. Under Fire Protection, I'm gonna come all the way down to Valves. The first valve I want to add is a pressure-operated relief valve. What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna click into my drawing area. We can specify an elevation, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna stick it right into a pipe. I'm gonna come up to this little half-inch pipe here, I'm gonna find a spot, and you'll see AutoCAD gives us a little cut-into snap. I'm just gonna cut it into the pipe right here. I want to accept the rotation. I'm gonna hit Enter. Now I'm gonna hit Escape a couple times. And notice that will cut the pipe out and it'll add our valve. Go ahead and select the valve itself. Notice that we can draw a pipe off of the valve. I'm gonna click on this little plus sign here to add a pipe, and it gives us the elevation that that pipe's at. So we'll click into Elevation. Let's go with 13 feet and hit Enter. I'm gonna draw a pipe over in this direction, maybe up a little bit. Now I'm gonna hit Escape. Let's go ahead and select our valve. Hit Control + wheel button. Let's go to a 3D view. Now we have a relief valve here, and we can branch off of it for more piping. Now let's look at another way to add a valve. Let's go over to where our inlet connector is for the fire department. In plan, it would be hard to put a valve on this pipe. It's a little trickier, but let's give it a shot. I'm gonna go to Mechanical Equipment. This time, I'm gonna grab a big old alarm check valve. Let's grab our two-and-a-half-inch flanged alarm valve. Notice that there's different sizes. I'm gonna click into the drawing area, and I'm gonna find this pipe, and snap over to where it cuts into it. I'm gonna pick a spot right here. Now I'm just gonna go this way to let it swing 180. I like to go away from any objects that I could accidentally snap to. I'm gonna pick a spot like right about there. Now what's gonna happen is this. Since this is a flanged valve, we can specify what flange we want to use. If I widen this, we can see the types of flanges we want. It's pretty cool that AutoCAD lets us do this. So I'm gonna grab the top one that's chosen, Butt Welded Lab Joint Flange, and I'm gonna click OK. Now I'm gonna hit Escape a couple of times. Now notice that it puts in my double flange and it also puts in the valve. And again, the type of valve, we can draw tons of pipe off of this. This is a lot easier than the 2D method of inserting a block, exploding it, trimming the pipe, and having it do it that way. Also, we don't have to specify what layer it goes on either. One thing to keep in mind too. Although you can add these valves in 3D, it's best to add them in plan if you can to make sure they're at 90 degrees. If you do add it in 3D, make sure you snap it to either 0, 180, 270, or 0.