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Daniel van WaasFeb 10, 2026

How To Use PipeCalc

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How To Use PipeCalc

Daniel van Waas

PipeCalc is a hydraulic frictionloss calculator that helps you design pipelines. It allows for multiple pipeline diameters, generates reports (PDF/Excel), and visualizes pressure loss. Perfect for water systems designers and engineers.

How To Use PipeCalc

Daniel van Waas

PipeCalc is a hydraulic frictionloss calculator that helps you design pipelines. It allows for multiple pipeline diameters, generates reports (PDF/Excel), and visualizes pressure loss. Perfect for water systems designers and engineers.

Chapters

00:00

Introducing PipeCalc

Introduction to PipeCalc and its purpose

00:16

Calculator Interface

01:00

Example Calculation

04:24

PDF Report

05:12

Excel Export

Transcript

00:00

Recently I built my own pipeline friction loss calculator PipeCalc because I was not happy with the fragile Excel sheets I was using.

00:08

The formulas used in the calculator are, all out of the ISO quality requirements for greenhouses.

00:14

Let me show you.

00:16

So this is pipecalc, a hydraulic friction calculator.

00:20

Here on the left in this column you can see the total pressure loss in the pipeline.

00:28

Here you see a graph which can be very handy.

00:33

later on we'll have a look at the reports it can download.

00:38

So either a PDF version or an Excel version.

00:42

And here the pipeline segments, we can give it a name.

00:46

We can give it the type of pipe, fittings, and then can add some extra margins in it as well.

00:56

And here we can add new pipelines too.

01:00

So let's, run through an example.

01:02

So we'll fill in a project name, which is, Stone Hills Well Water Tank Fill.

01:15

All right, so we're gonna fill an imaginary tank with well water.

01:21

This is the first pipe pipeline segment.

01:24

So let's say the pipeline is 150 meters long and this pipeline is the first section.

01:31

So we can say pipeline first section.

01:37

We'll make it PVC.

01:40

We will fill the tank with 15 cubes an hour.

01:45

And you can straight away see that it gives a warning that it exceeds the 2 meters a second.

01:51

Here we get a warning as well.

01:54

So 50 millimeter pipe is too small.

01:56

So let's make it a 75, which is an internal diameter of 69 millimeters.

02:05

And that looks a lot better.

02:09

This section, is 95 meters long.

02:14

It will have two elbows, one butterfly valve, one check valve at the pump, and one reducer.

02:24

It also has to avoid a couple of obstacles.

02:26

So add two 45 bends to it, and then it goes up and down with a sharp knee into the silo.

02:34

Give it a bit of a safety margin of 5%.

02:37

And the pipe has to climb 5 meters up to the silo because the silo is 5 meters high.

02:51

Right.

02:53

So here we don't have a warning anymore.

02:54

So that looks good.

02:56

And here is the total amount of pressure loss in the graph you can see this first part is that safety part we added.

03:07

And the rest gives a nice visual.

03:10

But for exercise purposes, let's add another pipeline segment.

03:14

Let's call this.

03:19

Existing because we are utilizing an existing pipe which is also from PVC, but this is 63 diameter PVC pipe, which is internally 5, 8 and is 55 meters long.

03:40

And 15 cubes goes through it.

03:43

This existing pipe have four elbows and a butterfly valve.

03:50

So here we can see the pressure loss for this existing pipeline.

03:56

And here we can see the pressure loss for the new pipeline we will install.

04:01

And here you can see it added up the two different numbers.

04:06

If we look at the 15 cubes an hour, we can see the 1.09 bar loss.

04:13

So this is very, very valuable information to size a pump for our system.

04:20

And now let's save this information to our project file.

04:24

So let's first have a look how the PDF will look like.

04:27

So Stone Hill's well water tank fill.

04:30

We zoom out a little bit.

04:35

Here's a system summary.

04:36

So this is the total pressure loss.

04:39

And here the first pipe section with the fittings list and the individual loss.

04:48

And on a different page you can see the the pipeline information of the existing pipe.

04:54

so yeah, pretty nice, sharp looking PDF file we can add to our project map.

05:01

Very nice.

05:02

And yeah, it does happen that you just want to copy and paste all the information of the pipework into another tool you might be using to size the pump.

05:12

In that case we can export it to Excel.

05:16

So this is a very simplified version of all the information.

05:21

Total pressure loss.

05:23

And over here we can see the calculations, the length of the pipes, total loss here broken down.

05:32

So a bit more detailed.

05:35

And here we can see the breakdown of the fittings.

05:42

The first few times you use the calculator, just make sure you double check the outputs.

05:46

It gives.

05:47

Just to be sure.

05:48

But, yeah, use it and let me know how it goes.

How To Use PipeCalc — Tella