A Common Size Group is a group of pipes that must be of uniform size.

There are two reasons to create Common Size Groups:

• Physical Requirements - All of the pipes in the group must be the same size in the field. For example, a long header may be drawn on the Workspace as a series of individual pipe objects. Adding these individual pipes to a Common Size Group forces the entire header to be a common size. If the pipes were not placed in a Common Size Group, it is likely that different sizes would be selected for different sections of the header. Requirements based on pipe connections are also common - it would not be unusual to require equal diameter piping upstream and downstream of a valve or other junction.

• Reduction in Complexity - Every additional independently sized pipe increases the difficulty of the sizing problem. Sizing problems with large numbers of independently sized pipes can take extremely long to solve, often for relatively little benefit. This is especially true when the resulting pipe sizes are similar, or when the cost of a particular pipe has minimal impact on the overall cost. For example, parallel pipes would often be expected to have the same size, and short connector pipes will likely have no significant bearing on overall cost if there are much longer pipes being sized. By adding these types of pipes to a Common Size Group, the solution time can be dramatically reduced.

Common Size Groups are defined in the Size/Cost Assignments panel.