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[Inconspicuous]

So, I'm trying to set up a plumbing system that will go all over the fortress, providing dwarfs with bathing water, providing wells and hospitals with drinking/cleaning water, mist generators in the dining hall, and eventually, drown elves.

I've ran into a few problems though.

One is a big one: My fortress floods every time because of water pressure. So, I need to reduce the pressure. Somehow.

The second problem is getting water to go up and down, as well as powering the pumps.

The third is the space it will take up, I'll probably end up skipping every other level to allow for piping.

One last problem is that I need a way to give dwarfs a bath (Totally unnecessary, I know) without having them get sucked down the drain, or contaminating the water (Could be very bad if the dwarf who just slew a vampire decided he was dirty. Or it could be very good.)

So, how do I solve all of these? And what would I need to do to get magma plumbing in as well?

[Fearless Son]

First of all, pumps are effectively "firewalls" for water pressure.  Whatever the pressure of the water is on their inward side, they reset to a fixed pressure on their output side.  This is directional and allows you to control the flow of pressure.  Water pressure should (and someone correct me if I am wrong here) only flow up to the level of the far side of the screw pump, after which point it equalizes out.

Secondly, one piece of advice I would have is to build a cistern somewhere higher than everything you want to provide with water, like a water tower.  This will allow you a ready source of water you can unleash to flow down into all the places you need it.  Make a pump stack from a primary water source (like a river) that will bring up enough water to fill it.  Maybe have a raised aqueduct running from the pump stack to the cistern.  Put another pump at the bottom edge of the cistern so you can draw water out when you need to.

Wind power is useful if you have it, if not then you will need to go with water power.  The difficulty of using water power (unless you are abusing DF's lack of the conservation of energy) is that the source of power should not be too close to the place where water is being drawn, or the reduction in flowing water beneath the wheel will compromise the pump's ability to draw it as power cuts out.  Either way, you will need some axles going about your plumbing levels.  Try to keep the paths from your power sources to your pumps as straight and clear and with as few divergences as possible.  The more corners and spots where you split power, the more you lose that power in the transmission. 

You will need a drain for your sewers, somewhere for the wastewater to go.  Either pump it back up and flow it down river from your input, or send it into a aquifer layer, or dig down and dump it into some out flowing pool or underground river in the caves.  Otherwise you risk backfilling your fortress and the whole place is flooded. 

Finally, pressure plates can be used to determine when "enough" water is in a particular spot.  Tend on the side of caution by setting the water level over the pressure plate to trigger at a lower level than you think you might need.  It will take a few ticks to send the shutoff signal, and in that time the water will keep pouring.  Use a floodgate or door with a floor grate drain on the other side to flush the water to your outgoing plumbing when you are done.  I might recommend you use baths that take a manual input the fill them, an automatic shut off that keeps them from getting too full, and another manual signal to empty them.  No sense in trying to be too clever to make this fully automatic, or you could end up with unexpected results. 

[PatrikLundell]

- An easy way to make a drain is to carve a fortification into a tile at the edge of the embark. This will allow water to leave the embark through it.

- An easy way to depressurize water is through a diagonal flow, as the pressure when getting through the diagonal is that of the level the water is at. Thus, I typically make a cistern by carving out a basin below the aquifer, and when its done and the stones in it have been removed, I set a miner to dig a path to the side, a diagonal, and then up through the aquifer. This keeps the cistern full at all times without flowing over.

[Thisfox]

I use two methods to decontaminate dorfs: The first is to have a walkway over gratings through an aquifer-fed waterfall to a booze stockpile. Basic dwarfwash. Two levels below, the water collects then flows to a drain, never touching another dwarf (although the drain does have a staircase down to its lowest point, just in case someone glitches down into the drain, or drops an artifact ring in there, or whatever). The drain leads to the edge of the map. Smooth and fortify the wall at the edge of the map, and water can flow out of it, as people above me have mentioned.

The second decontamination method is a sunken wellroom with gratings around the well. Dorfs stand on the gratings and wash in the wellwater. The well is several z-levels deep, and so far I've not found any cross-contamination from dorfs using this wellroom to wash in. But if I did, I could flush the whole thing with water, as it is below the level of the main drag, then drain it out the side of the map, and refill the cistern.

Remember, floodgates with labelled levers are your friends, and the Real World uses gravity-feed water pressurisation because it works, and it works well. I put levers in sensible obvious places, colour code them for convenience (the colour of the mechanism material indicates the colour of the subsequent lever made from it) and if anything goes wrong, I can always pull a lever and stop the flow until I can work out what I designed incorrectly.

- An easy way to depressurize water is through a diagonal flow, as the pressure when getting through the diagonal is that of the level the water is at. Thus, I typically make a cistern by carving out a basin below the aquifer, and when its done and the stones in it have been removed, I set a miner to dig a path to the side, a diagonal, and then up through the aquifer. This keeps the cistern full at all times without flowing over.

I do this all the time, the only difference is that I install a floodgate and a lever in that aquifer-fed pipeline as well. Then if I need to, I can cut off the water to the cistern. If you want the cistern to be drainable (perhaps you don't trust it, or perhaps you just want your artifact bucket back when someone drops it in the sodding cistern), make a drain to the edge as above. Word of warning: Connect the floodgates up before you fill the cistern. You can't connect it later.

Spoiler: Well Drain (click to show/hide)