Learn to leverage the automated counting function in Bluebeam to optimize electrical takeoffs on construction projects. This powerful feature can help you identify and count diverse electrical components automatically, saving time and increasing accuracy.
Key Insights
- The automated counting function in Bluebeam can precisely identify and tally various electrical components on a construction plan, eliminating the need for time-consuming manual counts.
- Users can create custom takeoff items in Bluebeam and assign these to the components that the software identifies and counts. This feature helps in quickly generating a comprehensive inventory of different electrical components like recessed CAN fixtures, light switches, and duplex outlets.
- While the automated count feature is potent, it requires careful review to ensure accuracy, especially when the components have varying line designations or are represented differently in the project plan.
This lesson is a preview from our Blueprint Reading & Construction Estimating Course Online (includes software) and Construction Estimating Certification Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Now we're going to explore our electrical takeoffs on this project. We're going to navigate over to sheet E1.2, and we're going to do a lot of counts of some of the different electrical components that we have here. And oftentimes there are going to be a lot of different fixtures, and it would take a really long time to count up each one manually by hand.
So Bluebeam has some very helpful functionality to allow you to tell the software what you want it to count, and then it will go in and automatically count up every instance of that particular markup or designation on a plan. So let's go ahead and try this out in action here. We see a lot of these circular, what appear to be overhead lights.
So let's go over to our legends, and let's see exactly what those are. We can see that those are recessed CAN fixtures. And to use this auto count, let's go ahead and make ourselves a takeoff item that we can then assign these automatically counted up items to.
So let's go to count, and let's just throw one on the page here. And we'll go ahead and select it and go to the properties, and let's just call this the recessed CAN lighting fixture. Recessed CAN fixture.
All right. Go ahead and make a color of blue-violet for that. And let's change our specification section to 26,000 electrical.
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Go ahead and add that to the tool chest. There we go. We've got it.
So to do our automated counting, we're going to navigate over to our left-hand toolbar, and we're going to hit search. When we hit search, we have the ability to hit get rectangle up here in the top. When we hit get rectangle, we go to that certain designation that we want Bluebeam to count up for us.
We simply draw a square or a rectangle around it, and then we just hit search. And when we hit search, you can see that it comes up with a lot of different potentials that could be the thing that we want it to count up. We can see that this picked up 1,2, 3,4, 5. So it picked up five items.
This one in particular is a little bit difficult because although all of the recessed CAN lighting symbols are exactly the same, they do have lines going through them to specify wiring and that they might be on the same circuit. So this one in particular is a little bit tricky of an exercise. However, we can see that it worked pretty well.
We got five of them, and you can still do your kind of visual review here to make sure that they are being picked up the way you want them to be. So you could select each one of these individually, and it'll take you on the plan to where they are for review. You could also do a bulk select with this box up here.
Once these are selected, you would hit this lightning bolt dropdown here and check the options. And then what you can do is apply the count measurement to different count types that we have in our toolbox. So let's go ahead and scroll all the way down to the bottom of our toolbox here, and we can see recessed CAN fixture that we've just created.
We'll go ahead and click it, and then we can see that that takeoff automatically put our count on that specific recessed CAN fixture. Let's go ahead and try another one quickly just to build some repetition and get the hang of it. Unfortunately, that CAN lighting fixture did not catch all of them because, like we said, some of them have different line designations, but this is still a very helpful tool.
So let's look at these receptacles, for example, and let's go ahead and hit Get Rectangle. And we're just going to go ahead and draw a box around it and then hit Search. And you can see that it picked up a lot of different receptacles here, and we can see that it picks things up that are oriented vertically and then things that might also be oriented horizontally.
So it is pretty strong functionality. So let's just go ahead and grab all of these generic ones. Some of these are GFCIs, which we may count up separately, but let's just grab these receptacles here.
Oh, and you've got to be careful for something that might be in the notes, too. You don't want to pick that one up as well. Okay, great.
So it picked up a few, and then we can go ahead and apply a count to that. And we don't have a take-off made up yet, so let's just put this checkmark on them. And then for that particular checkmark, we can just click on it, and then we can go into Properties, and then we can just call these Duplex Outlets, and we can just give them a color, and we can give them a spec section, and go ahead and put them in that way.
So that was just a quick tutorial of how to use the Search by Symbol feature. It's extremely helpful. It saves quite a bit of time when you're doing repetitive counts.
Unfortunately, this plan that we have right now, it wasn't the most valuable for, but I really just want to start to build that muscle and that skill set of how we could use that tool. And what we're going to do now is just go ahead and finish out some of these counts too. So let's go back to the tool chest, and let's grab that recessed can fixture, and we'll just go ahead and start taking off the rest of these can light fixtures here.
We've got this whole room that is full of them. We've got some here, one over here. The count of that one over in the bathroom.
We've got one here, one here, one here. And that looks to be all of our recessed can lighting fixtures. So next up, let's go over to our legend and see what else we have.
We've got switches. Let's go ahead and make a quick takeoff for switches, and let's do a count there. We're going to click on the can lighting fixtures.
We're going to duplicate that, go into our properties here, and let's just call this one light switches. We can give that a light blue color here. It becomes really easy to just choose these different count items and run through them.
That technique that I use from copying within the tool chest is very easy. You could also just grab a new count and input that info. You could set it as the default.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that there are a lot of different ways to do the same thing within Bluebeam. Some of it just comes down to personal preference and how you like to operate, and whatever sort of rhythm that you may like to get in when you're doing this work. There we go.
That appears to be all of our switches here. Let's go over to our duplex outlets here. Let's go ahead and add this one to the tool chest too so that we can make a duplicate of it.
We'll make a duplicate of it, and we will call this one our arc fault circuit interrupters because that is that type of outlet that we have there. I'm just going to keep the color the same since they're all going to go to our totals pages anyway. We've got two more arc fault AFCIs.
We've got another one over here. We've got this waterproof outlet. We've got an AFCI right here as well.
Is there anything else in this room? No, it looks like we are all taken care of. That's the majority of our electrical. There are some other miscellaneous features in here, but we can make that an exercise for this group to complete after we finish with this course.
Lastly, let's just go ahead and save our work one more time. That was our electrical work for the time being.
