Lateral Design Overview

Lateral design is available in both the storm sewer and sanitary sewer design programs. A lateral pipe is very much like a regular pipe in sewer network. It is a pipe between a lateral connection, inserted at the main pipe line, and a lateral cleanout that goes into the lot. The Lateral Connection and Lateral Cleanout are specific types of sewer structures, which can be defined in Sewer Structure Library. The lateral connection has a property of offset elevation relevant to the mainline sewer invert at the point of connection. The lateral cleanout is a circular structure with the same bottom and top diameters.

There are lateral specific parameters for the riser height, station at riser end (measured from mainline to cleanout) and the basement floor elevation.

For Draw Sewer Network in Plan View, Draw Sewer Profile, Report Sewer Network and Edit Sewer Network in the spreadsheet, the main line pipe will be shown from MH to MH. In plan view, you can label lateral station at the lateral connections (measured for its downstream MH). In draw sewer profile, the lateral connection labels are separated from pipe crossing labels so that lateral connections can have different label settings. Spreadsheet Sewer editor is able to edit both main line pipes and lateral pipes.

The following is the procedure of creating and editing laterals when working on a storm or sanitary sewer network.

1.    Create a new lateral

Click on the Add button for new structures and choose the option “Add Lateral from Cleanout Point”. Then pick a location to create the cleanout structure, and snap main pipe line to insert the lateral perpendicularly. Once the intersection point is determined on the main line, the elevation of the downstream end of the lateral is set to the mainline invert at the intersection, plus the offset value defined in the connection structure.

If this is the first lateral in the network, the program checks the Sewer Structure Library to get the first lateral cleanout and connection structure in the list. Otherwise the last used pair will be used. If there is no lateral cleanout or connection structure in the library, the lateral becomes a regular pipe.

2.    Edit a lateral

Editing a lateral is similar to a regular pipe. The lateral can change to a regular pipe if the end structures are changed to manhole structures. The lateral is perpendicular to the main pipe line when it is created at the beginning, but it can be relocated along the mainline by the Location button.  The invert elevation of both ends of the lateral can be modified as same as a regular pipe.