The scope of plumbing engineering, the engineer's role vs. the contractor's, the codes landscape (UPC vs. IPC), the design-to-inspection project lifecycle, and a roadmap of this 21-item program.
Plumbing engineering covers potable water distribution, sanitary drainage (DWV), venting, storm drainage, and a set of specialty systems layered on top — medical gas, grease waste, and fuel gas among them. This module builds the mental model the rest of the program assumes: how the engineer of record's design responsibility differs from the contractor's field responsibility, why the UPC and IPC genuinely diverge on values like fixture units, and how a project actually moves from load calculations through permitting, construction, and inspection to occupancy.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a drainage system that is perfectly sized for flow capacity can still fail if it is under-vented — a system-thinking failure mode this module frames from first principles, and one Module 8's DWV content and Module 9's vent-system content each return to from their own side of the problem.