Tips/Tricks for plumbing?

[Hierophect]

I've just recently gotten into ONI, and one thing I'm particularly struggling with is the plumbing. Whenever I build any form of branching plumbing system, water just seems to abruptly stop flowing... which inevitably leads to a lot of smelly duplicant messes. 

As an example, I've attached some images of what's happened when I attempted to create a valve-controlled offshoot from my usual plumbing system to a metal refinery. When the valve is turned off, water doesn't flow at all  - everything just stops, despite there being a clear direction to devices that need it (the toilets). And when it's turned on, it draws water from the toilet direction, rather than turning on the pump. This is really just one example, I have stuff like this happen to me constantly and I'm lost as to how to deal with it. 

Does anyone have some pointers or "tricks" to how the water system works, and techniques I could use to make it more reliable? It seems like water isn't based off of a pressure-based simulation system, which is kind of throwing me off from an intuition standpoint. I'd guess the same principles would apply to gasses but I haven't built any systems for gas yet that aren't point-to-point. 

Would greatly appreciate advice as a newbie!

[Kabrute]

all greens on one side all whites on the other.
Bridges are friends, priority inlet, not priority outlet, use to your advantage
Bridges act like liquid diodes
 

You specifically need a bridge

[beowulf2010]

I'm at work so I can't troubleshoot your issues directly, but in general, use bridges to direct flows. 

I tend to use a lot of one way pipes that span the height of the map. Every time I place an input to it, I use 3 bridges. 1 for the actual input, and 2 more on either side of the trunk line to force the direction of the materials. 

Liquids and a gasses flowbon their own from green to white, always. Pumps are only needed to get liquids into the pipes. 

Forgive the quick chicken scratch drawing. 

[martosss]

5 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

I'm at work so I can't troubleshoot your issues directly, but in general, use bridges to direct flows. 

I tend to use a lot of one way pipes that span the height of the map. Every time I place an input to it, I use 3 bridges. 1 for the actual input, and 2 more on either side of the trunk line to force the direction of the materials. 

Liquids and a gasses flowbon their own from green to white, always. Pumps are only needed to get liquids into the pipes. 

Forgive the quick chicken scratch drawing. 

In this case I think the input will wait for the main pipe to be empty. That might be an issue if you want the input to flow first. An example is a cooling/heating circle that needs to be emptied first.

The important thing are the rules by which precedence is governed:

1) when pipes split without bridges, contents alternate between all directions

2) when you have a bridge and:

• a split at the input of the bridge - content flows first in the bridge, then in the other direction
• a split at the output of the bridge - bridges wait for other contents at the exit to flow first, so they don't have precedence here.

There are many cases, so it's hard to succinctly describe all of them.

Again, in the scratch-case above, the input bridge has a split at its output(sorry for the input/output repetition, but that's how it's labeled), so content flows first along the main pipe.

The important question here, as in other cases, is which pipe should have precedence, i.e. which pipe should flow first in case they're both full.

If you connect the right bridge on the right side, then it will flow first:

This ensures that the bottom bridge waits for the right bridge to be empty.

I guess this setup is useful - it ensures that one of the pipes always has priority. It also sets the direction - green, so it is a source - content is coming from there.

In beowulf's case I think the top bridge is redundant. You can still have it, but it's not needed to set direction of flow or to manage precedence.

[PhailRaptor]

Your issue appears to be the hidden priority that inputs have over pipe flow.  The problem is the valve you have leading to your refinery.  Because the input for the Valve is not directly in-line with the pipe, you are creating an option for the packets of water to become confused about what direction is correct.  The Valve keeps calling for more water, so the packets that have already gone past the junction start trying to move backwards to try and fill the valve, instead of continuing on towards your bathroom complex.

[Hierophect]

Thanks all for the tips and suggestions! They're all very helpful. Very useful to know the bridge can be used as a diode/one way valve. 

It's worth noting, however, that the real problem with this liquid system was the little elbow connection in the attached image. For whatever reason, this caused the entire pipe to read as blocked, and after removing it, everything started to work as I'd intended again. It also continued to work after I connected the pipe slightly lower, below the green outlet of the bridge. So I guess it has something to do with attaching multiple pipes to a single output.