6.4. Inserting manifolds and manifold fittings<br>

## 6.4. Inserting manifolds and manifold fittings

The second step in editing the system is placing manifolds on the drawing. The number of manifolds depends on the number of HZ’s and the designer’s intentions: it may, for instance, be advantageous to divide one large manifold into two smaller ones in order to reduce the total number of pipe feeds in the system.

After making calculations it may be necessary to divide some of the HZ’s. This requires provision of additional manifolds or, more often, addition and adaptation of outlet ports to existing manifolds. Appropriate functions are available to facilitate these operations.

¨ To place a manifold in the drawing and adapt it to the construction:

1. Select “Manifold” component by clicking the button on the “Radiant” toolbar. The manifold inserting mode is enabled.

2. Position the mouse pointer at the point where you want to place the manifold and press the left mouse button – the manifold is placed on the drawing. The manifold may be located anywhere. For technical reasons, however, it should be placed near or inside a wall:

3. The small square with an arrow enables rotating the manifold in the drawing:

4. Move the manifold so that it is contiguous with the wall: inside the room (surface-mounted cabinet) or inside the wall (concealed cabinet):

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To add fittings (manifold valves) to the manifold you must specify their type. In the description of inserting a manifold above, there was no default manifold type defined in the general data. In this case the manifold inserted is “clean” – i.e. with no type and fittings specified. If the manifold type is specified, default fittings for the given type of manifold will be placed on its inlet and outlet sides, and new fields corresponding to the fittings will appear in the manifold data table:

Depending on the type of manifold, the valves may be defined unambiguously – factory-mounted. When the “Valves other than std.” field is set to “No”, then the factory-mounted valve is adopted in calculations. If “Yes” is specified, then during calculations a valve matching the flow rate is sized within the range applicable to the manifold.

It is not necessary to determine the required number of outlets in the manifold being inserted, as the necessary outlet will be added when subsequent pipe feeds will be connected.

A different procedure must be applied when you want to add ports to an existing manifold that has pipe feeds already connected to it. Simple increasing of the number of ports causes addition of ports at the end of the manifold. Sometimes, however, to avoid crossing of the pipe feeds, you may want to insert an additional port between, for instance, existing ports numbers 2 and 3. There are two ways to go about that. You can add a port at the end of the manifold and reconnect some of the pipe feeds to make a port available in the required position or you can insert the port in the required position and make the necessary graphical corrections of the components that were shifted. The latter method is simpler and preferred.

¨ To insert additional ports in the desired positions of the manifold:

1. Mark the manifold by left clicking on it within an area without pipe feeds.

2. With the pointer positioned on the manifold, press the right mouse button to display the manifold pop-up menu and select the first item in the menu: “Insert connection point ...”:

3. A menu is displayed, shown on the right side in the figure above. Select the required item. The first port is designated as “1”.

4. After selecting one of the options, the new connection is inserted accordingly. The existing ports are automatically drawn aside. This, however, may deform some of the pipe feeds, which will then require correcting: