Associating Hydrants to Pipes

Hello Adam,

 You could use the tool – Batch morph which will convert your hydrants into junctions, but it will not give you same labels as that of hydrants.

• • So what you could do is go to hydrants flex table>Export them as shapefiles.
  • Go to Tools>Modelbuilder>now import these hydrants as junctions using Modelbuilder with key field as LABEL, which will assign the same labels to junctions as that of hydrants.
  • Now you have junctions in place of hydrants with same labels, so you can now delete these orphan hydrants. If all the hydrants are orphan , then select by element>hydrant>delete.

• • If not, all are orphan, then go to View>Network Navigator/Navigator>Network Review>Orphan Nodes>Right click in drawing>Edit group>Hydrants tables>select in drawing all>delete.
• Now go to Tools>Batch pipe split>select the orphan junctions using Network Navigator as mentioned above, specify the tolerance. This will connect the junctions to the nearest pipes by splitting them.

This does make sense but how are we to make hydrants into junctions and then associate them with the given pipe when they range from 5 ft to 35 ft away from the water main? Does this seem like to much of a tolerance? 

Alternatively, if we wanted to use the hydrants as hydrants and keep them where they are, how do we add a lateral to associate the hydrant to the nearest pipe for use in completing the available fire flow function?

Currently, taps and laterals are not supported with the hydrant element (see this article). There are some complications, because the hydrant element already has a built-in option to represent the lateral losses. 

If your hydrants are too far away from the main pipes and Sushma's option won't work, you could try something like this:

a. Export the hydrant flextable to shapefile, inlcuding just the label field.
b. Delete all hydrants
c. Import the shapefile using ModelBuilder, with the customer meter table type and label as the key field.
d. Use the customer meter method in LoadBuilder to automatically assign the customer meters to the nearest pipe. Choose the option to create the taps and laterals automatically.
e. Delete all the laterals and customer meters
f. Export the Tap flextable to another shapefile
g. Delete all taps
h. Import the taps shapefile using Modelbuilder with the Hydrant table type and label as the key field
i. Run the Batch Pipe Split tool to connect the hydrants to the pipeline.
j. Use the lateral loss option in the hydrant properties to account for lateral losses, if needed.

Hello Jesse, 

I have had success up to the point of step d. Once I assign customer meters to the nearest pipe via loadbuilder, it appears that an amount of meters still assign to nodes. Is there a way to override this such that the meters do not associate to nodes at all? This seems to typically happen at dead-end water mains and some miscellaneous intersections. For reference, out of 502 meters, 464 of them were associated to pipe; this left 38 meters associating to nodes instead of pipes. This is a problem because 38 of these meters do not have taps and will not be included in the exporting shapefile. Any easy way to fix this? 

Best,

Adam Carrier

Hello Adam,

Thanks for pointing out the oversight. Try this:

d2. Home > Select by element > customer meters (to select all of them)

d3. Network Navigator > Network Trace > Find elements associated with customer meters

d4. Tools > More > Batch Morph

d5. Choose "selection" for "choose nodes to process" and select Hydrant as the new node type.