design Do all plumbing structures need their own output line?

[Dopey]

I've been playing for a while (100 hours on steam) and still don't understand plumbing.

As the title says, should I just have every sink, lavatory and shower keep its own output line to "polluted water dump" or is there a way to join their outputs without blocking each other. (sink/lavatory "not pumping")

I frequently have lavatories momentarily becoming out of service and duplicants washing their hands halfway and stopping.  I've had a few rounds with just 8 dupes out to about 350 cycles working okay with these little problems being easily ignored.  Now I'm attempting a "take them all in run" and the plumbing is getting to me.  I want it working smoothly before I'm swamped with dozens of duplicants.

~12 kg/use from lavatory, 1 kg/s from shower, ??? kg from sink (5 kg clean water stored).

Pipes should be able to hold 10 kg per segment.  Is there a set amount of fluid I should expect a pipe to handle? 10 kg/s, less than that because pipe flow is slower than a segment per second?

Running them all in series on a single line definitely fails.  I've had my partially working setup with a pipe bridge connecting each structure's output to a single output pipe leading to the water dump.

I'd expect having 1 or 2 segments of pipe after a toilet be able to "hold on to" the water until it can flow into the main pipe if the main pipe was full at the moment it was trying to pump, but it just goes out of service "not pumping."

I'm not far enough along in the current place to see if valves everywhere help but it'll probably ugly-up the place more than half a dozen pipes leading from each latrine to the waste water area.

[bzgzd]

You don't need own pipe from each toilet all the way to dump area.
Adding 1 or 2 pipe segments before joining main pipe should be enough.

Maybe make some screenshot when you have toilet out of service?

I have it connected like this and I don't get any "not pumping" problems.

37 minutes ago, Dopey said:

Pipes should be able to hold 10 kg per segment.  Is there a set amount of fluid I should expect a pipe to handle? 10 kg/s, less than that because pipe flow is slower than a segment per second?

It is 10 kg/s - same as one fully running liquid pump can provide.

[Dopey]

Thank you.  After some attempts to test things it seems to be related to buggy pipe bridge behavior. Needed to rebuild lavatories and shower to recalculate flow path, the stuck fluid flowed normally after rebuilding the structure, not the pipe.

I think the pipe bridges are causing the short flicker.  Because I noticed it with just one person using a lavatory with an immediate pipe bridge from the output. Pipe bridge may just masked short output path I'm sure a single pipe connecting to the main line would have similar behavior, could also be related to build order confusing the flow path of fluids from each building.

Here's a screenshot, normally I'm running on full speed so I didn't see the momentary pipe blocked message.

Spoiler

You have a more breathing room between things, I attempted to do the same but after a few attempts of moving the output lines around, like how in the screenshot now the shower runs below the lavatories... Pipe bridges may be to blame.  I tried to reorder everything and got this...

Spoiler

Now everything is reconnected, pipe bridges removed, and the pipes think they aren't connected...  I even detached the shower to only let the lavatories access to the pipe bridge.

The highlighted pipe is just over the output, used to be full of 10 kg, I rebuilt it and now it took the remaining 1.7 from a toilet flush.

All three lavatories are now in the same not pumping blocked pipe state with 1.7 kg sitting in the pipe above the output.

Edit: !!! Needed to rebuilt the lavatories and shower to get the stuck water to flow.  I guess it only recalculates a path whenever you build something... This 2nd screenshot's layout flushes smoothly, I assume the shower will play nice now too. Assume.

So overall observations

1. Direct output connection blocks use for long periods while other plumbing is draining
2. Only 1 segment of pipe right over the output (the bridges don't appear to hold liquid) then the main line gives intermittent failure.
3. 2 segments, then pipe bridge to main line (Adding a little arm first, like your lavatories), was my 300 cycle partly working system.
4. Don't use pipe bridges? Keep 3-4 pipe segments before you merge the fluid outputs, structure build order may be a problem

[PhailRaptor]

2 hours ago, Dopey said:

Don't use pipe bridges?

Generally, yeah.  My personal beef with them is the fact that they have specified input and output flow behavior attached to them.  I can't tell you how many times I've selected it, flipped it 3 or 4 times, asked myself "it goes THIS way...  right?", placed it, then needed to tear it back out and rebuild it the other way again.

Frankly, the Pipe Bridge (and Air Duct Bridge, as well) should have a non-specific input/output connection.  There are no moving parts to provide flow direction in them, so why does it actually matter?

[Neotix]

8 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

Frankly, the Pipe Bridge (and Air Duct Bridge, as well) should have a non-specific input/output connection.  There are no moving parts to provide flow direction in them, so why does it actually matter?

Right now bridges can be used in many ways because they're one directed. The most popular is prioritization of merging and splitting pipes. By making bridges 2-way you just want to erase some design opportunities just because you're making mistakes in placing them.

[Dopey]

I do like the bridges for the one way flow to keep joined air ducts from backing up into each other.

I think my final ideas are to give fluid source tiles several pipe segments of their own before you hit the main line to stop them from short temporary blocked pipes.

Pipe bridges aren't at fault, rebuilding structures seems to recalculate flow paths through your pipes and ducts.

I've had a case where adding an exosuit dock to my main air line stole all the air flow exclusively (until that path was full) which I blamed on a duct bridge but now I'm thinking it was because it was the last thing built on the line so it updated the air flow path to favor itself.

That's all speculation but rebuilding all the lavatories and shower fixed all blocked pipes in the second screenshot so I'm going to test rebuilding my gas pumps and liquid pumps (whatever source) whenever I have weird flow behavior to see how that changes things.  Not in the mood to build screwy setups to test it immediately but I'm sure I'll encounter something sooner or later.

[Saturnus]

15 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

Frankly, the Pipe Bridge (and Air Duct Bridge, as well) should have a non-specific input/output connection.  There are no moving parts to provide flow direction in them, so why does it actually matter?

Tesla valves don't need moving parts to be directional.

[Dopey]

5 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Tesla valves don't need moving parts to be directional

Very cool, never heard of it, just saw one in action.

[GuyPerfect]

I get the feeling that the pipe Bridges and Gas/Liquid Shutoffs only have specific input and output sides as a consequence of the game engine. They operate by actually intaking some of a certain resource and outputting it elsewhere, so they can't be consolidated in an intuitive way. This may change before the game is finalized.

A benefit of the intrinsic capacity of Bridges is that they're useful to combine multiple "packets" of the same resource in the event two packets are not already as big as a packet can be. For example, in an ordinary T junction, 10g of Water coming from two directions will have to share the junction, alternating between source pipes and forcing the other to wait. Using a Liquid Bridge at the site of the junction, on the other hand, will combine the packets into a 20g packet and get the Water through the network twice as fast.

The moral of the story is this: always use Bridges at junctions to help packets of the same resource combine. Hopefully they'll make it automatic eventually.