Water Flowing in Pipes why size matters (1)

What makes water

flow?
How fast will it flow?
Real pipes in real
houses
How much pressure is
needed?
What size pipe do you
need?

How fast will the

water flow?

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These pages explain how to choose the

correct sizes of pipe when plumbing a
house, and why it matters. This section
explores the theory, and a practical
worked example is given in part 2 .
Why do plumbers use so much half-inch copper pipe?
This article explains why water pipes in houses are
the sizes they are. It shows how to choose the correct
size of pipe, why it matters, and whether or not a
house water-supply system will work properly once
it's installed.
Plumbing books say what to do, but not why. Building
services design books offer design rules, but not
where they came from nor why they matter, and fluid
mechanics textbooks are full of complicated theory
that doesn't seem relevant to real problems - Why
does this pipe make a noise? - Can I add another
radiator?
So I started from first principles, asking basic
questions and following up the answers until I could
see what was going on. It turned out to be rather
more complicated than I thought. Calculations for a
real house are in part 2.

Why does water flow?

This question seems almost too stupid to be worth
asking, yet it leads to a way of heating the hot-water
cylinder without needing a pump.
A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter...
When you turn on the tap, you expect water to flow
out of the tank and down the pipe. Why does it do
that?
Things don't just start moving by themselves. There
must be a force acting on the water in the pipe for it
to move, and the obvious one is its own weight. Water
is quite heavy stuff - a litre of it weighs a kilogram.

is quite heavy stuff - a litre of it weighs a kilogram.

The water in the tank pushes down on the water in
the pipe.
So does the size of the tank matter? Common sense
suggests that a big tank that holds more water must
apply more force to the water in the pipe than a little
one would. But common sense is wrong. The force
pushing the water down the pipe has nothing to do
with the volume of the tank, nor its surface area.

The force making the water flow down the pipe must
exist at the entrance to the pipe. How big is this force?
What controls it?
Suppose the water is stationary - any taps connected
to the pipe are turned off. Now think about the
column of water directly above the pipe entrance
(shown as a dotted line). It has weight, and its weight
is a force acting downwards. So,
Down-force on the water in the pipe = Weight of water in
the column above the pipe

But surely the weight of the water just outside the

column affects the down-force too? No, it doesn't.
How can it? Weight acts downwards, not sideways.
The force due to the weight of the water outside the
column acts downwards too - but outside the column.
So the down-force in the column stays the same no
matter how much water there is around it.
In the sketch above, both tanks hold the same amount
of water, but one is twice as tall as the other. The
water surface in the taller tank is twice as far away
from the pipe, so there is twice as much force pushing
water out. If you punctured both tanks near the
bottom, water would squirt out much faster from the
tall one.

tall one.
What about the down-force at some point further
down inside the pipe? Since the down-force at any
point is due solely to the weight of water above it, this
force must be bigger at a point further below the
water surface, because the column of water above it
is bigger and heavier
Suppose the pipe runs vertically, then horizontally
under a floor, then down vertically again. The water
in the horizontal section has weight too - won't this
add to the down-force? Well, no, it won't, for the same
reason as before - weight acts downwards on that
section of pipe, not sideways. So it turns out that the
force that makes the water flow has nothing to do
with the size of the tank, nor with the length or shape
of the pipe run. It's purely to do with the vertical
distance between the water surface in the header
tank and the point where the water leaves the pipe at
the tap. This distance is known as the head of water
for the system.
Water squirts out of a hole
The force acts on the water in the pipe, and the pipe
diameter is known, so it's often convenient to think of
the force as a pressure. Pressure is simply force
divided by area - in this case, the cross-sectional area
of the pipe.
Think of a particle of water somewhere in the header
tank. With no water moving, the particle is stationary.
There is no net force acting on it. If there were, it
would move. But there is a force applied to it - the
weight of the water above it. And if the particle
happened to be near the wall of the tank, and you
poked a hole in the tank wall, the particle would
escape through it. So there must also be a sideways
force from all the particles next to it, or it wouldn't
move sideways out of the hole. Yet if it's not moving,
all these forces must be in balance. In fact, in a
stationary liquid, the pressure at a point is a force that
acts in all directions at once: up, down and sideways.
The particle is ready to move in any direction at a
moment's notice, like the SAS. It's possible, and
normal, to talk about the pressure at a point in a
liquid.

liquid.
The pressure at the bottom of a vertical pipe is
...

The weight depends on

the volume of water (in
m3) and its density (in
kg/m3). The density of
water is about 1,000
kg/m3 - a litre weighs a
kilogram. So

where g is the acceleration due to gravity - about 9.8

m/sec/sec. (Kilograms are about mass, not force, so g
has to be included to do the conversion.)
The pressure depends on the length of vertical pipe.
In fact, the length that matters is the height difference
between the bottom of the pipe and the water surface
at the top - in the diagram on the left, the height h.
This is known as the head. It's measured in metres, or
feet of water, or mm of mercury, or pounds per
square inch (psi), or Newtons per square metre
(N/sq.m). Whatever units are used, it's still a
pressure.
What's a Newton?
This might be a good
point to talk briefly
about units. I'm used to
thinking in proper
engineering units like
Newtons and watts, not
pounds and BTUs,
whatever they may be.
British Thermal

British Thermal
Underpants?
Isaac Newton was one of the first to say clearly that
Force = mass x acceleration

The down-force on your hand when you're holding an

apple is the mass of the apple (0.1 kg, say) times the
acceleration due to gravity (about 10 m/sec/sec). This
force is (0.1 kg x 10 m/sec/sec) = 1 Newton. Force these
days is measured in Newtons. A Newton is the weight
of a small apple - but then, in Newton's time the
apples were smaller.
Proper forces, like the weight you can lift with one
hand, are lots of Newtons. A bucket holds 9 litres of
water (2 gallons) and weighs 8 kg (18 lb.). This weight
is a force of 80 Newtons. The pressure on the bottom
of the bucket is about 3,000 Newtons per square
metre (N/sq.m), though the pressure on your fingers
when you're carrying the bucket by its handle is
much higher - maybe 50,000 N/sq.m, or 7 psi (lb/sq.in).
Example - 15mm pipe

What force, and what pressure, is exerted by

a 1 metre vertical column of water in a 15mm
pipe?
A vertical 15mm pipe 1 metre long holds
about 0.15 litres of water, which weighs 0.15
kg, giving a down-force on the bottom end of
Force = mass x acceleration = 0.15 (kg) x 9.8
(m/sec/sec) 1.5 N (Newtons).

This force exerts a pressure of

Pressure = force / area = 1.5 (N) / 145 (sq.mm) =
1.5 x (1,000/0.145) 10,000 N/sq.m

at the end of the pipe. This sounds huge but

actually it isn't very big at all. You could poke
your finger in the bottom of the pipe to
prevent the water flowing out.
By the way, normal atmospheric pressure is ten times
greater than this, but we don't notice it because it
surrounds us. Atmospheric pressure is the same at
both ends of the pipe, so it can't influence the flow.
What matters is pressure difference.

Hot water from gravity

There are lots of ways of heating the water in the
cylinder, and one of the oldest methods can be the
simplest and cheapest. It depends on the apparently
odd fact that hot water weighs less than cold water.
Here is a boiler
heating the water in
a cylinder. All the
boiler does is heat
water in the pipe on
the right. The water
itself does the rest.
To see why, think
about the pressures
in the pipes on each
side of the boiler.
The right-hand pipe holds hot water at, say, 82oC. The
pressure at the bottom is then:

Similarly, the pressure at the bottom of the left-hand

pipe, which holds water at, say, 65oC, is:

If these two pressures are different, the water will be

forced to move. And as the graph shows, water at
82oC is about 1% less dense than the same water at
65oC. This may not sound very much, but it's enough.

The difference in the density of the water in the flow

and return pipes is about 10 kg/m3. A litre of the cold
water weighs just 10 grams more than a litre of the

water weighs just 10 grams more than a litre of the

hot water. This tiny difference - less than the weight
of an English robin - provides the force that makes the
water move.
The circulating pressure then seems to be:

but there is one more detail to factor in.

The water being moved is hot, so it weighs less than
cold water, so the circulating pressure would make it
move slightly faster than if it were cold water. The
correction is easy to add:

It's more usual to express the pressure in a more

general way that doesn't directly involve h, because
then you can calculate how fast the water will flow
round even a complicated circuit. But this is getting
ahead of the story. For now, assume that the boiler is
on the ground floor and the cylinder is on the floor
above, so that h is (say) 3 metres. Then, putting in the
numbers for this example, the pressure is

This is a real pressure difference, and the cold water

will push the hot water around. The only major
drawback is that the pressure difference is so small,
which means that the pipes have to be fat for it to
work well. But it does work, and it doesn't need a
separate pump.

How fast can water flow?

The next obvious question is, what controls the speed
of the water that flows out of the tap?
This is where things start getting a little more
complicated. Pipes have been in use for quite a long
time now, and many clever people have tried to
understand exactly what happens when you turn on a
tap, but believe it or not, the physics of water flowing
in pipes is still more described than explained. The
problem lies in friction.
Sticky cylinders

Sticky cylinders
When the water is moving slowly, it's easy. Think of
the water in the pipe as a series of thin-walled
concentric cylinders, one inside the other, each
sliding relative to its neighbours. This is more than
just a convenient image. It gives a good picture of
what's really going on. The interesting stuff happens
where the cylinders rub past each other. The cylinder
nearest the pipe wall doesn't really move at all - it
seems to be stuck to the pipe. The next one in does
move a bit, and as they slide past each other, the outer
cylinder exerts a frictional drag on the inner one and
slows it down. Similarly, the next one in and the one
inside that are slowed down too. The cylinder right in
the centre of the pipe moves the fastest.
If you don't believe this, it's possible (but not easy) to
set up an experiment to prove it. It does happen.
Some liquids flow more freely than others, and the
concept of viscosity was invented to describe the
effect. Viscosity is really a definition of how well a
liquid resists shear stress - that is, the force making
layers of the liquid slide past each other.
Viscosity

Viscosity is measured like this. With a layer of liquid

trapped between two parallel plates, the top one is
pulled so that it slides steadily over the liquid. The
viscosity of the liquid is defined as

The units of viscosity are evidently Newton-seconds

per square metre - that is, [Pressure x Time] - though
some people prefer "poises" or (my favourite) "feetslug-seconds". That one really conjures up a picture.
But it's useful to have the idea of viscosity, because it
says explicitly that a liquid resists being made to
move. A force is needed, and the force increases with
speed.
Engine oil has a viscosity of about 0.5 N.sec/sq.m.,

Engine oil has a viscosity of about 0.5 N.sec/sq.m.,

which means that plates 1 metre square separated by
an oil film 1mm thick could be slid slowly apart at 1
metre/sec by a strong man applying a force of 500 N
(Newtons) - about 100 lb, or 50 kg. A millimetre of cold
water, by contrast, needs a force of only 1 N - just a
few ounces. A strong Newt could do it, if the Slugs
didn't get under its Feet.
If the viscosity of water is so low, why does it matter?
Think back to turning on the tap. As the water in the
vertical pipe begins to move, the cylinders of water
slide reluctantly past each other. The viscous drag
appears as a force acting upwards, opposing the
down-force due to the weight of water. The water
accelerates, and since the opposing force depends on
speed, this viscous drag increases too. Eventually,
when the tap is running freely, the forces exactly
balance - there is just enough down-force to overcome
the friction force at this speed of flow. Viscous
friction is the force that controls how fast the water
flows. Viscosity explains why the water leaving the
tap doesn't just carry on accelerating without limit, as
it would if there were no opposing force.
Now, the force pushing downwards is the pressure.
More exactly, the net down-force on the water in a
length of pipe is the pressure difference between its
ends. This down-force is exactly balanced by the
opposing up-force due to viscosity. So there must be a
simple relationship between the pressure drop in a
pipe and the corresponding flow rate. It's not all that
difficult to derive it from first principles, if you enjoy
integration (and I know some people do). But if you
don't feel like doing that right now, the answer is

where is the viscosity of the fluid flowing in a pipe

of radius R and length L. Unfortunately, although this
equation is nice and simple, it comes with a warning it's only true for slow-moving fluid. But how slow is
slow?
Chaos rules
About 120 years ago, in Manchester, a man called

About 120 years ago, in Manchester, a man called

Osborne Reynolds was trying to understand - or at
least describe - the flow of fluids in pipes. After many
careful experiments, he decided that what happened
to the flow depended on four things - the viscosity and
density of the fluid, the diameter of the pipe, and the
speed the fluid was moving. He put these four
quantities together like this to make a dimensionless
number:
Reynolds
number

Speed x Diameter x (Density / Viscosity)

The number has been known ever since as the

Reynolds number, Re. Respect!
Reynolds found that when the fluid moves slowly, the
flow stays smooth and even, but as the speed is
increased it eventually becomes rough and turbulent chaotic, we would say now. The transition to
turbulence always happens at a Reynolds number
between 2,000 and 3,000, no matter what fluid is used.
(The reason for the uncertainty is probably to do with
small variations in initial conditions - chaos is like
that.)
In other words, the simple equation above relating
flow rate to pressure drop is only valid when the
moving water has a Reynolds number of 2,000 or less.
If Re is higher than this, the water starts bouncing
around unpredictably, and it takes more energy more pressure - to shift it along.
As well as speed and pipe size, the Reynolds number
Re depends on the ratio of the water's density to its
viscosity, so to save having to work out (/) each
time you need to calculate Re I've included a table so
that you can simply look it up.
Table 1: Viscosity and density of
water
Temp Viscosity Density
oC

10

0.00133

999.7384

753,000

20

0.001

998.2

998,000

30

0.000753 996.6739 1,320,000

40

0.000567 995.1502 1,760,000

50

0.000427 993.6288 2,330,000

60

0.000321 992.1097 3,090,000

70

0.000242 990.5929 4,100,000

80

0.000182 989.0785 5,440,000

90

0.000137 987.5663 7,210,000

Example - Reynolds number

Cold water is flowing through a 15mm pipe

run. How fast can it go before it starts to
become turbulent?
The Reynolds number for this flow is
Re = (Speed) x (14/1000) x (753,000) =
(Speed) x 10,500

(assuming "cold" means 10 deg.C and the

pipe's internal diameter is 14mm), so if Re is
to be 2,000 or less, then
Speed < 2,000/10,500 ... or Speed < 0.19
m/sec

Not very fast, then. How about hot water (at,

say, 70 deg.C)?
Re = (Speed) x (14/1000) x (4,100,000)
= (Speed) x 57,400
so Speed < 2,000/57,400 ... or Speed <
0.035 m/sec

which is really slow. Don't get too hung up on

the numbers, by the way. Chaos is not exact.
It's enough to say that turbulence is likely to
start at around 0.2 metres/sec.
Is turbulent flow essential in domestic water systems?
Cold water flowing in 15mm pipe starts to become
turbulent at the slow speed of 0.2 metres/sec. In
22mm pipe, the speed is lower still (0.13 m/sec). Does
it matter that the water is moving so slowly?
The question is, how long are you prepared to wait
for the sink or the bath to fill? A flow rate of 0.2
metres/second means that just 0.2m (20cm) of the
pipe's contents come out of the tap in one second.
Now, 22mm pipe (the size normally used to plumb in
a bath) has an internal cross-sectional area of 320
sq.mm, so the volume occupied by 20cm of water is
just:

Volume = Length x Area = (320 x10-6) x (20 x102) = 64 x10-6 cubic metres = 0.064 litres.

A bath holds typically 100 litres. It would take nearly

half an hour to fill at this rate. Clearly 0.2
metres/second is far too low a speed to be useful. If a
higher speed means turbulence, then so be it.
The trouble is that allowing turbulence is really not a
good idea. For one thing, the particles of water are
bashing into each other all the time, and that takes
energy, and that means a much bigger force has to be
applied to move it. For another, the force you need
can't be calculated. It has to be inferred from other
peoples' experiments.
Shake, rattle and moan
But the worst
part of
turbulence in
pipes is the
noise. In
turbulent flow,
particles of
water move in
random
directions at
random speeds.
Well, so what? One particle of water is much like
another. The problems begin when a particle decides,
all by itself, to change into steam.
Large pressure differences can appear across very
small volumes of turbulent water, especially when the
water flows round a bend, or through a constriction
like a valve or a tap.
In fact, bends can cause the flow to separate from the
wall of the pipe, like this. Because the water is
suddenly forced to move sideways across the pipe,
whilst at the same time it is moving along the pipe,
vortex eddies appear. They spiral off down the pipe,
wasting energy as they go, until they are damped out
by viscous friction. Bends should be avoided. If they
are inevitable, then the more gradual they are, the
better.

Sudden changes of velocity (that is, speed in a

particular direction) cause equally sudden - and
dramatic - local changes in pressure.
This creates problems because water at a lower
pressure boils at a lower temperature. At the normal
atmospheric pressure of 1 bar (14.5 psi, or 100,000
N/sq.m), water boils at 100oC of course, but if the
pressure drops to 0.1 bar it will boil at only 47oC. The
water in a central heating system is hotter than this.
When the local pressure somewhere in the water
drops low enough, a particle of water turns
immediately into a bubble of steam. The bubble soon
moves back into a region of higher pressure and
collapses, and the resulting shock wave zips through
the water, bouncing off the pipe walls. The more
turbulent the flow, the more often this happens. The
process is known as cavitation, and it can corrode the
pipework as well as a making a disturbing amount of
noise. If you think about it, bubbles do form
spontaneously in turbulent water. A waterfall, or the
wake of a ship, or rocks in a stream all cause the
water to foam. So does flushing the loo!
More speed
means a lot
more noise

Measurements show that the cavitation noise from

fittings (that is, elbows and tees) goes up with the
speed the water is moving. Each increase of 1 m/s
raises the noise level by a factor of about 4, and it's
generally agreed that a water speed above about 3
metres per second makes cavitation noise
unacceptably loud.
Cavitation isn't the only source of noise. Turbulence
causes eddies to appear in the flow, and besides

causes eddies to appear in the flow, and besides

wasting energy they cause noise and vibration in the
pipe network. Large eddies can be moving at up to
10% of the average speed of flow, and contain energy
at frequencies from a minimum defined by
fmin = (Average water speed) / (Pipe diameter)

on upwards. For a 15mm pipe carrying water at 1.5

metres/sec, fmin turns out to be 100 Hz. Frequencies
above 100 Hz contain progressively less energy,
because viscous friction damps them more quickly.

The energy is coupled to the pipe network and may

cause some part of it to resonate. The moving water
acts rather like a white noise generator, seeking out
any resonances in the pipe network. That's why pipes
should be clamped firmly to the wall at intervals of no
more than a metre or so. The speed of sound in water
is about 1450 m/sec (at 15oC) - about 30% faster than
in air - so a 1 metre length of pipe can't resonate at a
frequency below about 700 Hz, and there shouldn't be
enough stray energy there to worry about.
All this boils down to an engineering trade-off
between cost and convenience. Slow-moving water
implies large-diameter pipes, which would cost more
to install. The key question is, how much noise will
people accept?
Most sources recommend that the speed of water in
pipes should be kept to less than 2 m/sec, and some
specify a maximum speed of 1.5 or even 1 m/sec.
Remember the Slug. The Reynolds numbers
corresponding to usable water speeds for each size of
pipe are summarised here.
Table 2: Maximum Reynolds numbers for standard pipes
Re
6 mm
at...

10
mm

15
mm
7,300

22
mm

28
mm

35 mm 42 mm 54 mm

0.3
m/s

2,600

4,800

11,000 14,000

18,000

21,000

28,000

1.0
m/s

8,600

16,000 24,000 36,000 47,000

59,000

71,000

93,000

2.0
17,000 32,000 49,000 73,000 94,000 120,000 140,000 190,000
m/s

The table shows clearly that the Reynolds number for

The table shows clearly that the Reynolds number for

water moving at 2 metres/sec is way larger than the
2,000-3,000 maximum that would guarantee nonturbulent flow. Real plumbing in real houses is
designed on the basis that the water flow will be
chaotic and turbulent. Unfortunately, there is as yet
no proper theory to describe turbulent flow, so
systems have to be designed on the basis of
experience rather than physics. The simple theory I've
been investigating just doesn't apply.
What happens in the real world?
So if there is no simple theory, is there a complicated
one? Pipeline systems do get built, after all, and the
engineers who design them must know what they're
doing. How do they manage it?
Darcy-Weisbach

One key tool seems to be an expression called the

Darcy-Weisbach equation, which predicts how much
pressure would be needed to push a given fluid along
a pipe at a particular speed. What makes it tricky to
use is that it includes a "friction factor" ( f ) which
depends not only on the smoothness of the pipe - since
copper is smoother than, say, concrete, you'd expect it
to have a smaller friction loss - but also the Reynolds
number of the flow. But that in turn depends on the
speed of flow. In other words, you can only calculate
the speed if you already know the speed! It's not quite
as daft as it sounds, but it's certainly rather
complicated if you only want to design the plumbing
in a house. I've included a worked example in part 2.
Real-world engineers prefer a simpler approach. They
use the Hazen-Williams equation. The equation is
strictly only valid for water at below about 25oC, but
that's OK. It's much simpler than the alternatives. To
use it, we need to know the head h, the pipe's length L
and the 'hydraulic radius' (Rh - half the pipe's internal

radius). And because the material the pipe is made

from can also make a difference, there's a friction
coefficient C which for ordinary copper or plastic pipe
can be taken as 150. The graph below illustrates what
the equation predicts will happen when the head is
3m, as it might be for a bath or shower. It shows that
a small increase in the length of a short pipe makes a
big difference to the flow-rate. On the other hand, you

big difference to the flow-rate. On the other hand, you

could safely add another 10m length to the garden
hose without it making much difference at all.
Hazen-Williams

The graphs illustrate that the flow rate you can get
from a given head drops off dramatically as the pipe
length increases. But using the equation to design the
plumbing in a house would lead to a lot of tedious
calculation. There is a better and simpler approach,
which I describe in part 2.

Real pipes for real houses

In the real world the range of pipe sizes you can
actually buy is quite restricted. Builders' merchants
usually stock the standard sizes listed in the table
below. The size given (eg. 15 mm) is the outside

below. The size given (eg. 15 mm) is the outside

diameter of the pipe.
Pipe
dimensions

Table 3: Standard plumbing pipe sizes

Plumbers'
10 15 22 28 35
42
merchants
mm mm mm mm mm mm
call it ...
Some
plumbers
know it as
...
Internal
diameter
(mm)
Crosssectional
area (in

3/8

1/2

3/4

in

in

in

54
mm

1
1 in 1 /4
in

11/2
in

2 in

8.8

13.6 20.2 26.2 32.6

39.6

51.6

61

145

320

539

835 1,232 2,091

mm 2)

In passing, it's worth pointing out that the standard

sizes changed slightly when metrication was
introduced. This might matter if the half-inch pipe
that was installed in your kitchen thirty years ago is
not exactly the same size as the new 15mm pipe
you've just bought to plumb in the new dishwasher.
The fittings may not quite, er, fit.
Smaller pipe must be cheaper and easier to install, so
why isn't 10mm pipe used for everything? (In France,
it often is!)
Small isn't always beautiful
A bath should fill in five minutes or so. Suppose in the
interests of economy you decide to plumb it in with
10mm pipe. The bath holds about 100 litres, so to fill it
in 300 seconds will require a flow rate of (100 / 300) =
0.33 litres/second. Now, the internal cross-sectional
area of 10mm pipe is about 61 sq.mm, so a 1 metre
length of it holds about 61 cubic millimetres, or 61
milli-litres (ml). A flow rate of 0.33 litres/sec therefore
means a water speed of about (0.33 / 61 x10-3) = 5.4
metres/second - about 12 mph. Given enough pressure
you probably could do it, but the roaring noise would
frighten children and small animals, and cavitation
damage would mean you'd have to replace the pipes
and fittings after a few years anyway. It's probably a
bad idea.

Each size of pipe is intended to carry a specific flow

rate, quietly. Cross-sectional area is what matters
here. A simple calculation of volumes shows that, at
the maximum recommended water speed of 2
metres/second, the maximum flow rates are:
Maximum quiet
flow rates

Table 4: Quiet flow rates (litres/sec) of

standard pipes
10 15 22 28 35 42 54
mm mm mm mm mm mm mm
1.5
0.08 0.22 0.45 0.82
m/sec

1.3

1.9

3.1

2.0
m/sec

1.7

2.5

4.2

0.1

0.3

0.6

1.1

To check the actual flow rate, get a bucket and a

watch. A bucket usually holds 2 gallons ( = 16 pints, =
9.1 litres). At a 15mm pipe's maximum flow rate of 0.3
litres/sec, the bucket will fill in 30 seconds. At a 22mm
pipe's maximum flow rate of 0.6 litres/sec, it will take
15 seconds.
Bath taps and sink taps
If 10mm pipe is not an option for the bath, then what
is?
The idea is to choose the pipe sizes so that the water
flows fast enough to fill the bath or the sink in a
sensible time without making too much noise. A
kitchen sink holds 10 or 12 litres of water. So to fill a
10 litre sink with water moving at 2 m/sec would take
85 seconds using 10mm pipe, 34 seconds with 15mm,
15 seconds with 22mm ... and just 2 seconds with
54mm pipe.
Now, if the sink filled in 2 seconds it wouldn't save
much time on the washing up, and besides, water
would splash all over the kitchen. Most people don't
mind waiting half a minute or so for the sink to fill,
and that's why kitchen sink taps are designed to be
connected to 15mm pipe.
A bath holds about ten times as much as a sink: 100 to
120 litres. If both the hot and cold pipes are 22mm,
and you run both at once, the flow rate is over 1.2

litres/second, so the bath fills in less than a minute

and a half. Bath taps are designed for 22mm pipe.
If you want to know how to calculate real flow rates
in a real system, the method is given here in Part 2.
Be warned - the numbers I use all refer to copper pipe.
If you want to use plastic pipe you should be aware of
the differences. You may find John Cantor's site
interesting.
Copyright John Hearfield 2007, 2012