Getting Started with Caident Design

Getting set up

If your organization has purchased Caident Design, you can download the application from the Downloads page in your Caident account.

Before getting started, make sure your organization administrator has assigned you a Caident Design seat. This gives your account access to the application. If Caident Design doesn’t appear in your available downloads or you can’t access the application, check with your organization administrator to confirm that a seat has been assigned to you.

Caident Design includes four interface themes: Light, Dark, Midnight, and Sandstone. When using a dark theme, you can also keep the drawing area on a light background so plan linework remains easy to read.

The workflow

A typical fire sprinkler design in Caident Design looks something like this:

1. Start a project and import a CAD or PDF floor plan.
2. Select the floor plan you want to work with. Caident Design detects walls, doors, scale, and rooms from the imported drawing.
3. Review the detected rooms and make any adjustments needed.
4. Add the riser and water source and enter the available water supply information.
5. Place sprinklers, either automatically based on the detected rooms or manually.
6. Lay out the piping, drawing the main runs yourself and using auto-routing to connect the remaining sprinklers.
7. Run hydraulic calculations directly from the design.
8. Create your output, including plan sheets, a bill of materials, or CAD files.

The rest of this walkthrough goes through each part of that process.

Import the architect’s plan

Caident Design can import vector PDFs, scanned PDFs, and CAD files.

Architectural drawings often contain more than the floor plan you actually need, such as title blocks, schedules, details, or multiple plans on the same sheet. During import, you can select just the portion of the drawing you want to use. Each selected floor plan becomes its own space in the project.

When a floor plan is imported, Caident Design analyzes the drawing to identify walls and doors and determine its scale. Vector PDFs exported directly from CAD typically provide the best results.

Scanned plans can also be imported and analyzed. If Caident Design can’t reliably detect the drawing information from a scan, you can still use the imported image as a background and design over it manually.

If the detected scale isn’t correct, you can quickly recalibrate the drawing by selecting two points with a known distance and entering the actual measurement.

Review detected rooms

Once the walls, doors, and scale have been identified, Caident Design can automatically detect enclosed rooms, referred to as compartments.

During detection, the application accounts for common drawing elements that could otherwise interfere with the room boundaries. Door openings are closed when determining room boundaries, room names can be picked up from drawing text, and dimensions, dashed lines, and fixture symbols are ignored where possible.

Compartments are an important part of the design because they can be used for sprinkler placement and room-specific information such as ceiling height.

If a room isn’t detected correctly, you can adjust which imported drawing layers represent walls and doors and run detection again. Rooms you’ve manually edited are preserved unless you choose to return them to automatic detection.

You can also create compartments manually by clicking around the room boundary or roughly tracing the room and allowing Caident Design to snap the boundary to nearby walls.

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Work with the drawing

Caident Design gives you a full set of drawing tools for building and editing the fire sprinkler design. Everything happens on a vector canvas drawn in real-world coordinates.

The main tools include:

• Devices: sprinklers, risers, water sources, meters, and backflow preventers
• Piping and spaces: pipe, vertical pipe, compartments, and barriers
• Annotations: dimensions, text, leaders, and circles
• Drawing: lines, rectangles, and polylines for property lines, equipment outlines, site details, and other supporting information

For precise drafting, you can use endpoint, midpoint, center, intersection, and perpendicular snaps along with Ortho and Polar angle locking. Lengths can be entered in decimal feet or feet and inches.

Standard editing tools are also available, including window and crossing selection, move, duplicate, array, mirror, and nudge. Snapping works with both the imported background and objects you’ve added to the design, making it easier to line up new work with the architect’s plan.

Objects can be edited through the Inspector or their right-click menu. Layers and groups help organize larger drawings, and undo history covers changes throughout the project, including imports and routing.

Objects created automatically by Caident Design remain editable. You can select, move, modify, or delete them just like objects you placed yourself.

Place sprinklers automatically or by hand

Sprinklers can be placed individually using the Sprinkler tool or automatically across the detected rooms.

For manual placement, select the sprinkler type and click where you want it on the drawing. Available types include pendent, upright, sidewall, concealed, recessed, extended, and dry sprinklers.

You can configure information such as K-factor and part number for each sprinkler type so the same information carries through to hydraulic calculations and the bill of materials. Sprinkler elevations can also be based automatically on the ceiling height of the room, with the option to override them individually when needed.

For larger layouts, Place Sprinklers can automatically lay out sprinklers throughout the detected rooms. Caident Design aligns the layout with the room geometry and checks the resulting coverage based on the spacing you specify. Options are also available for NFPA 13D considerations such as small bathrooms, closets, and garages.

After placement, Caident Design reports the results by room, including rooms where sprinklers weren’t placed and the reason they were skipped.

Automatic placement does not replace sprinklers you’ve already placed. Any automatically placed sprinkler can also be moved, edited, or deleted afterward, so the generated layout can be used as a starting point rather than a locked result.

Route the piping

Caident Design lets you control the important parts of the piping layout while using auto-routing for the repetitive connections.

Start by drawing the runs you want to control directly, such as a main through a hallway or along a beam line. Caident Design can then route branch piping from those runs to the remaining sprinklers.

Piping you draw manually remains fixed during routing, giving you control over where the main portions of the system run. You can also add barriers that routing cannot cross and define a boundary for each floor to keep piping within the intended area.

Auto-routed branch lines connect into the mains and inherit their pipe material and diameter.

You can choose whether routing updates automatically as the design changes or only when you tell it to rerun. Routed piping remains fully editable afterward, including its position, material, and diameter.

Pipe properties are selected from a table of actual piping products, including Schedule 40, CPVC, PVC, copper, PEX, and others. If the piping specification changes, existing piping can also be converted to another material without redrawing the system.

For multi-floor projects, vertical pipes connect piping between aligned floors and allow sprinkler elevations on upper floors to be calculated correctly. Underground supply components, including the water source, meter, backflow preventer, and riser, are managed separately from the above-ground floor plans.

Annotate and organize the plan

Dimensions, text, leaders, and general drawing tools are available for completing the plan.

Dimensions update automatically when their endpoints move, while text and leaders can be configured with different sizes and colors. Additional linework can be placed on your own drawing layers for items such as property lines, easements, equipment pads, or other project information.

You can also make corrections to the imported drawing when necessary. Added linework can be incorporated into the background geometry, while incorrect background geometry can be brought into the editable drawing, corrected, and added back. Room detection can then use the updated geometry.

The Layers panel keeps your own drawing layers separate from the imported drawing layers. Imported layers can also be identified as walls or doors to help Caident Design interpret the floor plan correctly.

Run hydraulic calculations

Caident Design uses CaidentCalc’s hydraulic calculation engine to check your fire sprinkler design against the available water supply, so you can evaluate hydraulic performance directly from the drawing.

Enter the water supply information from the flow test, including static pressure, residual pressure, and flow, then select Hydraulics and choose the sprinklers that should be included in the calculation area. For an NFPA 13D design, for example, this may be the two most remote sprinklers. The calculation area shows each selected sprinkler along with its K-factor and flow.

From there, you have two ways to calculate:

• Quick Calc runs the hydraulic calculation directly from Caident Design and returns the pass/fail results without requiring another application to be open.
• Send to CaidentCalc sends the fire sprinkler design to the CaidentCalc desktop application, where you can review the hydraulic model, run calculations, and generate calculation reports.

Results are shown for each calculation area, including required pressure, available pressure based on the water supply curve, pressure margin, and total flow.

Caident Design and CaidentCalc use the same hydraulic calculation engine, so calculations remain consistent between the two applications. If you change the fire sprinkler design after sending it to CaidentCalc, Caident Design will indicate that the calculation is no longer synchronized so you know when it needs to be sent again.

Build a bill of materials

Caident Design can generate a bill of materials directly from the fire sprinkler design. As the design changes, the material quantities update with it. The BOM includes pipe by material and diameter, fittings based on the piping layout, hangers, sprinkler adapters, sprinklers by type and part number, risers, underground equipment, and vertical piping.

You can also enable costing to add unit prices and extended costs to the material list. Standard pricing can be maintained in a global price book and reused across projects, while individual prices can be overridden for a specific project when needed.

The price book can be edited directly in Caident Design or through Excel.

When the BOM is ready, it can be exported as a dated PDF.

Create sheets and export the design

When the design is ready for output, switch from Model to Sheet view to lay out the project for printing.

You can start with a standard plan sheet or use your own uploaded sheet template. Paper sizes range from Letter through Arch E, and drawing frames can be positioned on the sheet and assigned a standard architectural scale.

From the completed project, you can export:

• Plan sheets as PDF at the selected paper size and scale
• Bill of materials as PDF
• CAD files for use in other CAD workflows

CAD exports are R12-compatible, with one drawing unit equal to one foot. The exported design is organized onto named layers and includes sprinkler symbols, piping with diameter labels, hangers, barriers, annotations, and riser details.

Projects themselves are saved as a single compressed .cdsn file containing the complete design. Project files created in older versions of Caident Design can also be opened in newer versions.