Plumbing design that flows from day one

The discipline nobody notices — until it's wrong

Good plumbing design is invisible: water arrives at pressure, waste leaves by gravity, vents keep traps honest, and gas reaches every appliance at the pressure it needs. Every one of those outcomes is a sizing and routing decision made on paper. Torch makes them deliberately — fixture-unit calculations, slope and venting checked run by run, risers coordinated against the structure — so the system that gets built is the system that was designed.

Scope and deliverables

· Domestic water design — service sizing, distribution, and pressure management
· Sanitary waste and vent systems, sized by fixture units and routed for slope and access
· Gas piping design and sizing for commercial and residential loads
· Fixture schedules and riser diagrams that let a contractor build without interpretation
· Specialty scopes — grease interceptors for food service, commercial kitchen plumbing, and repipe engineering for buildings replacing failed systems
· Plumbing sets delivered standalone or inside the coordinated MEP package

Deliverables are permit-ready drawings and calculations, sealed through Apex Grid Engineering's licensed Professional Engineers, with plan-check responses from the design team.

Where the work concentrates

Restaurants and commercial kitchens, where grease, gas, and fixture counts make plumbing the long pole in the permit. Multifamily and hospitality, where risers repeat and mistakes multiply. Repipe projects, where the design has to respect a building that stays occupied. State coverage starts with plumbing engineering in Arizona.

How the design gets coordinated

Plumbing is the discipline most punished by poor coordination — its pipes need slope, slope needs depth, and depth fights structure, ceilings, and every other trade's runs. Torch designs plumbing alongside the structural and architectural sets it threads through, resolving invert elevations, shaft space, and fixture rough-ins during design rather than in the field. The gas design is coordinated with the mechanical loads it serves; the water design with the site civil connection it ties into. The result is a plumbing set that installs in the order it was drawn.

Common questions

When does a project need a plumbing engineer?

When fixture counts, gas loads, or system complexity pass what a standard plan set can assert without calculation — most commercial work, all commercial kitchens, and any system a reviewer has to verify rather than trust. If the jurisdiction asks how the system is sized, the answer is an engineer's calculation.

What is a grease interceptor, and when is one required?

Food-service drainage usually has to pass through one, sized to the kitchen it serves. Our answers library covers grease interceptors and their requirements in detail.

Who stamps the plumbing drawings?

All PE stamping is backed by Apex Grid Engineering, whose licensed Professional Engineers seal the work in the project state. Torch does not present itself as the licensed entity.