Sprinkler placement & coverage
Head layout is what Design Studio was built around first, so there are several ways to do it — one at a time, a rectangle at a time, a room at a time, or the whole drawing at once.
| What | Where you'll find it |
|---|---|
| Head tools | 1 2 3 4, or the DRAW toolbar group |
| Coverage Cell tool | L, or the head-layout button in DRAW |
| Fill rooms automatically | Auto → Auto Generate Heads (this room / all rooms) |
| Ceiling grid layout | Auto → Ceiling Grid Auto Layout |
| Coverage shading | View → Head Coverage Shading |
| Pick a sprinkler | Tools → Sprinkler Catalog… |
Placing one head
Press 1 pendent, 2 upright, 3 sidewall, 4 concealed pendent — or use the DRAW toolbar group — then click. While the head is on your cursor you get:
- Live spacing dimensions to the walls and heads around it, turning red when a number breaks your spacing rule.
- A coverage ghost showing the footprint that head will actually protect, blocked by real obstructions.
- The tile magnet, the light-midpoint magnet, alignment guides to existing rows, and the centre-between snap — see Snapping.
Sidewalls take two clicks: one to place, one to aim. The head's point is the apex of its triangle, so snapping to a wall line puts it at the wall face rather than straddling it.
Which sprinkler?
Tools → Sprinkler Catalog… browses 306 heads from Reliable, Senju, Tyco, Victaulic and Viking. The dropdowns filter each other down to the exact model; applying it sets the sprinkler tool's defaults and updates any heads you have selected.
Coverage Cells — a rectangle that fills itself
The head-layout rectangle is called a Coverage Cell. Press L, drag a rectangle over the area, and it fills with a head array spaced inside your limits.
- Drag a cell edge and the array re-spaces live.
- Ctrl-drag a cell to copy it — repeating bays take seconds.
- Cells snap edge to edge, so adjacent areas tile without a gap or a doubled row.
- Delete the cell and its heads go with it. The cell owns them.
Mix cells and single heads freely — use cells for the big regular areas and place singles in closets and odd corners. The coverage check treats them identically.
Filling rooms automatically
- Auto → Auto Generate Heads — hover a room to see its outline previewed, click to fill it. (All Rooms) does the whole drawing.
- It is grid-aware, fills wall shadows, and respects the Walls layer and Offset settings in the AUTO toolbar group (leave the offset blank for half the maximum spacing).
- Auto → Ceiling Grid Auto Layout lays heads on tile centres, room by room, with a six-foot minimum between heads and a coverage audit at the end.
- Auto → Auto NFPA 13D applies residential rules.
Spacing and coverage come from the hazard fields in the ceiling-layout settings, so set those before you run a whole floor.
Coverage shading
View → Head Coverage Shading paints what each head covers. It is the fastest read on whether a room is done.
- Shading is blocked only by real obstructions — a door swing arc stops at the header, not the whole opening.
- Room Protection Checkmarks tick off rooms that are fully covered; Room Not-Yet-Covered Tint shows the ones that are not.
- The flood-in animation can be turned off if you would rather it just appeared.
- Each head's coverage area is a property, so you can set it per head as well as by default.
Sidewall coverage is S × L
A sidewall shades S along the wall (half each way) by L of throw entirely on the room side, plus a free 6" strip behind it that is shaded but never counted — so maximum area per head is exactly S × L. Both numbers are typed in the Properties panel as Coverage along wall (S) and Throw across room (L), defaulting to 14'-0" × 14'-0". The facing comes from the wall it snapped to and is editable. Pendents and uprights keep symmetric half-dimension boxes.
Elevation — setting deflectors once
The MODE group on the toolbar carries a drawing mode dropdown. Default places heads exactly where you click. A named mode — an elevation profile — sets each placed head's deflector elevation automatically: uprights 2" below deck tracking a sloped roof plane, pendents at the ceiling height for the area, sidewalls on their own rule. The gear button beside it manages the modes and the job's deck and ceiling heights.
To change heads after the fact, select them and use Set Deflector Elevation — AFF or below the roof plane. The conversion accounts for head length, so the number you type is the number you get.
Checking the layout
- Tools → Evaluate If EC Heads Can Be Standard Coverage… — marks each extended-coverage head with a gold star or a red heart depending on whether a standard head would do, with a small-room option.
- Right-click a head → Why is this head here? — explains what put it where it is.
- Right-click → Move Sprinkler Out of Obstruction when one has landed badly.
- Auto → Auto-Dimension and Dimension All Heads… string the spacing dimensions for you — see Annotation & dimensions.
- The Analysis → Issues tab lists spacing, coverage and obstruction complaints in plain language.
Flex drops
Three routes, depending on when you want to decide:
- Flex Drop tool — click the branch outlet, then the head, and a VicFlex AH2 drop is laid. Right-click it afterwards to change its length or friction loss.
- Pend+Flex and SW+Flex — place a head that already carries its flex kit with an open inlet, and let the piping connect to it later. This is how you flip a whole floor to flex without redrawing.
- The auto-route and connect-to-pipes tools have a Flex option for the last leg.
Uprights never use flex, so there is no upright variant.
Symbols
2D plan symbols are set per head (right-click → Plan Symbol, with Apply this symbol to all similar heads), or in bulk from the plan symbol catalog. A sidewall draws as a filled triangle with its apex on the wall, turned to its facing, sized to read the same as a pendent's circle. Heads still export to DWG and DXF as plain circles — that is deliberate, because the AutoSPRINK weight calibration is circle-specific.