houadfel (asker) Apr 4, 2013:

Thank you Tony. I really appreciate your help.

Tony M Apr 4, 2013:

stub A stub is a (possibly short) length of piping pre-installed by one work package ready for onward installation of further equipment by another work package (or of course as part of the same work package, but in a later phase).

We have had the equivalent FR term before in FR > EN, I hope you can find it in the archives.

If you have the blueprint, then that might enable you to work out whether this is indeed one stub for the CW and one stub for the fire service circuit, or if here is some other configuration. In particular, if there is only one 83 fire service circuit (I wonder if this is perhaps a dry riser?), this might indicate that the plural 'stubs' was indeed intended to include the CW supply (note that the fire circuit, if a wet one, is likely to be supplied from a different feed than the domestic water supply). It might, of course, be that there are several 8" fire service connections, each connected to its own stub.

houadfel (asker) Apr 4, 2013:

Thank you for your insight. In fact the text is the second note in a list of plumbing notes provided at the side of a blueprint depicting the plumbing and drainage plan of a construction project. This is all the context I have. A basic question is how do you understand 'stubs' here? Thanks

Tony M Apr 4, 2013:

Parsing I think you are parsing it wrongly, you need to read it as 'connect... to stubs provided' and then '8" fire service' separately

8" refers to the diameter.

There may be something slightly odd about your text; on the face of it, the 4" CW needs to be connected to the domestic water and the 8" fire service needs to be connected to the stubs provided... But it seems odd to me that 'stubs' should be plural if as it seems there is only a single 8" fire service connection; so either both of them are connected to stubs (which is what I would normally have expected), in which case the word order seems a bit awry; or else there is some other explanation, which you may need to try and figure out from the rest of the context, or else ask the customer ;-)