Project description

The Project description panel records the administrative context of the hydraulic study: project identity, site location and client, together with a general notes field for the assumptions that shape the network. None of this affects the solution, but it travels inside the project's .ghe file, so a drawing sent to a colleague or archived at the end of a project arrives with the context needed to read it.

Project information - Enter the project number, project name and client name for your records; none of it affects the hydraulic study.

Site location and map - Provide the site address, city, postal code, province or state and country, then press the Validate address button . It sends the address to an online mapping service, which returns the site latitude and longitude and displays a location map. An active internet connection is required. If the address cannot be resolved, refine it, since a complete street address gives the best result, and validate again. The coordinates are stored with the project for documentation.

General notes - Use the General notes field for anything a later reader would need in order to judge the network. A hydraulic drawing is a set of decisions, and most of them are invisible in the geometry: which return scheme was adopted and why, where the balancing devices are expected to be installed, what pipe material and jointing method the installer will use, what the plant room actually looks like compared with the simplified diagram, and which lengths were entered from the real installation rather than left at the value a freshly drawn pipe starts from. Record also the design condition the network was solved at, in particular the fluid temperature chosen, since a loop sized at an annual average behaves differently on the coldest day of the year.

GLN in practice: documenting what the drawing cannot show

A hydraulic model is a diagram, not a construction drawing. It carries the topology, the diameters, the lengths and the elevations, and those are enough to compute the flows, but it says nothing about how the network will be built. Two networks with identical models can behave very differently once installed, depending on how the headers are actually assembled, how the loops are purged, and whether the balancing devices reach the site at all.