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Hi. I’m Charles Ellison, Civil 3D Designer and Trainer at autocadcivil3dtraining.com. Today we’ll be looking at pipe network labels, specifically, question marks that can show in place of our pipe network slope and how to solve this problem. Let’s take a look.

I ran into this problem the other day when I was labeling some spans in my pipe networks. I’ve got this span of pipe. It’s basically a downspout that connects into a catch basin right here. What I want to do is I want to label this span of pipe. I go into Add Labels. Wait for that to come up. Click on Pipe Network, spanning pipes plan, and I’m just going to leave that on this PVC. I go ahead and start adding in the first part and then the last part. We’ve got this whole span of pipe. They’re going to be labeled. Specify label location on the pipe. I’ll just click right here. Do you see this? I get question marks for my slope, and I’m not sure what’s going on here.

I want to close this down, and I look at my properties window. If I click on this first pipe right here, we’ve got 1%. I’m just going to go ahead and doc that like so. I’ve got 1% here, 1% here, and then what about this pipe? Oh, wait a minute. We’ve got -1%. That might be the trouble, okay? In order to get this to work properly, I’ve got to change the slope so it’s consistent. What I’m going to do is I’m going to change my upstream and downstream structures in order to get this to come out correctly.

Now, the way to do that is to go ahead and select that pipe, and I’m going to click Modify, Change Flow Direction, and it says right here, “Select an intended upstream starting point in the plan view.” I’ll click this structure, and I’ll select the downstream, which is this catch basin. I’ll go ahead and click enter, and there you go. Behold. Now it works properly.

That was an issue that I had on this particular piece of pipe, and I was wondering, “How the heck is this coming up with question marks rather than the actual slope?” Come to find out the pipe slope does need to be consistent whether it’s positive or negative. Hope that helps you. Take care.