Connecting VAVs and Air Terminals for Revit Mechanical Course: Step-by-Step Guide

Welcome back to the VTCI course content for the Revit mechanical course. In the previous video, we went ahead and finished up placing the rest of our registers on the south side of the building for these classrooms here. Now we're going to go ahead and we also tied in our VAVs to our supply system.

Now we're going to go ahead and connect our VAVs and our air terminals. So I'm going to zoom in on this last one here. Now, once you have these placed, you can make some adjustments.

Notice how this VAV is extremely close to this diffuser, and obviously that connection just may not work very well. So I'm going to go ahead and actually extend this out a little bit, and we can always come back and refine this, and we will. I'm going to select this guy, drag it over, and there we go.

Now the one thing that you'll notice when you select the mechanical equipment, the VAV here, you'll have these different connectors. So this piece of equipment has two connectors, an inlet and an outlet with their specific sizes. So what I can go ahead and do is if I click on that little symbol right here for the supply, what that would allow me to do is start creating a duct at that size that's listed above because that is what the connector is defined as.

So I hit click on that. I'm going to start making my duct. I'm going to go ahead and make this a 10-inch round.

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So what I'm going to do is I'm going to change in my properties palette. I'm going to change to tapped short radius. I'm also going to go ahead and make it a 10-inch duct, and there we go.

I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to come out to like say here, and there we go. Now however you decide to do it, you could complete one room at a time, or I could just continue to go down.

I'm going to just continue to go down. So I still have this 10-inch radius duct that has, or a 10-inch diameter duct that has the round duct, and then notice I can select the connector here. I'm going to pick that, drag out, click.

So it's very similar to what we did with the previous. So I'm just going to go ahead, and if I need to make adjustments, we can always come back. One thing I think a lot of people get caught up with with Revit is they think that everything has to be perfect right when they put it in the first time.

We can make adjustments. We can change it around. So don't worry about that.

I'm just going to go down and get all these connections in. Perfect. Looks like I might have an extra VAV there.

Not a big deal. We'll delete it here in a second. Go from there.

I'm going to go ahead. If you happen to find an extra VAV or something, I just have one, I'm just going to go ahead and select it and delete it. I'm going to look at this layout a little bit.

For the most part, it's pretty good. These two down here are a little bit how I don't want them. So I'm going to go ahead and drag over, and just to get it so I have some ability to make the connection to these here.

Great. Now what I want to go ahead and do is if I want to extend these out a little bit, you know, there's a lot of changes and things that you can go ahead and do. Now what we want to go ahead and do is create the taps off to the individuals, and those are going to be 8-inch ducts.

So what I'm going to end up doing is I can go to my systems tab. I'm going to go to duct. Currently, I have my 10-inch diameter.

Well, I'm going to go ahead and take an 8-inch diameter, and I'm going to go ahead and just click on this guy, drag over. You can see it puts the fitting in there because this is all at the same elevation. I'm going to go ahead, do this one, pick, come here, drag over, pick, and you can even line these up if you wanted to, depending on the requirements of your system.

So I'm going to go through. I might need to adjust that one, but since I have the duct command active right now, I'm going to go ahead and keep going on. So again, we kind of have maybe some different layouts here going on, maybe due to the requirements of the rooms.

So let's go ahead. I'm going to go out here, there, come out here, there. We want to make sure that all these connections, though, are going to be after the VAV.

We can't go before the VAV. We want to go after the VAV. Come off and just work my way around and make these just taps off.

I might need to make some longer ones because maybe I want to go ahead and start to connect these guys longer. You can even put them at an angle if you wanted to. So I could go ahead and click off at a 45 and notice how it puts a tap in like that.

There we go. Keep working my way across. I'm just going to keep going.

I am getting kind of close to the actual diffusers themselves. One thing that you may have in a project is that you may have a limit on the length of your flex duct. So make sure you account for that.

And then we'll put a short one in here. I'm going to shift some of these around and then here to here and here to here. Keep going around.

It does seem to get a little bit repetitive, but this is practice. We're practicing and we're doing what we need to do. Going.

And there we are. I'm going to go ahead and actually slide these over just a little bit to kind of make a little bit better arrangement here. I'm going to go back to duct, pick my connections.

This one, I might need to extend out a little bit. It's a little far from the air duct, so I can just grab it, grab the grip, drag it down. And again, just making changes as I go.

Maybe I don't want such a long tagging on the end of this. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to take that there. And I think let's take a look.

Oh, we got one more duct. I'm going to go ahead, do my tab out, do my tab out. We'll go ahead, do the tab out, do the tab out.

And then we just make some necessary adjustments. There we go. There we go.

And maybe lengthen this guy just a little bit to get closer to that duct. And there we are. So the last piece of the system is to tie it into the air terminals.

FlexDuct is actually really easy to draw. You just want to make sure you're always snapping to the connectors. When I select this duct over here, this end piece or this end shape handle, I can right click on it and I can go draw FlexDuct.

This is kind of the easiest way to do it. If you already have a point you're starting from, then I just go click there. Boom.

I'm going to put my FlexDuct. Once I've started that FlexDuct command, then I can go ahead, I can click there, click there. There we are.

Here, here, here, and here. So again, what I did, I selected it over this little shape handle, this drag icon. I right click, draw FlexDuct.

And then I just go around and create my FlexDuct. Remember, this FlexDuct is going in two different directions. It's not only going out and away, but it's also turning down to allow for my connection to the air terminal.

I could just continue on. There's that, there's that, there's that. I might need to draw one more here.

You know what? We can come right off the end there. There's that. I'm just going around and just drawing FlexDuct.

I've always kind of liked to organize my commands in certain ways. We might need to make some adjustments to this one here. That one's kind of tight.

We'll make some little adjustments here in a second. This guy's going to connect here. Now, obviously, we don't want to cross like that.

So what I'm going to do here is I can just grab these and drag them. Nothing super crazy. I'm just making my adjustments as I need.

So again, select on that drag icon, right click, draw FlexDuct. And if I wanted to continue the length of duct, if I wanted to maybe make a 90 degree or 45 degree bend here, I could also select draw duct, but we want to go ahead and use FlexDuct. So FlexDuct, boom, get the connector, go to the endpoint, get the connector, go to the endpoint and work my way around.

It's going to keep going and work my way through. And here we go. I believe that we're almost there.

A couple more to go. And if you need to adjust the Flex, you can always go back and do that at a later time by selecting it and adjusting the shape handles. There we go.

So let's say we finished this. So let's say like in the case of this one, well, I didn't want this to be so long. I didn't want this to bend so hard here.

So I'm automatically keep that connection. So I just grab this. I'm going to grab that drag, take it to the connector there and boom, it's connected back up.

You see this little shape handle, this little like kind of clear circle. I can go ahead and drag that back and forth to kind of change the angle of the Flex. And there we go.

So let's take a look at our system real quick. Looks good. Looks good.

Looks good. Maybe this guy, I'm going to go ahead and adjust a little bit, bring it a little closer. As such, maybe I'm going to go ahead and bring these down so that I don't have so much tagging.

Another way to go ahead and clean that up is I can go ahead and use the split tool. So under modify, I have split, which is right here, what element or SL I could split this guy here. It's going to put a split in there and they're going to select that and delete it.

And then there's also a little union that gets put in when you split. And so instead of shortening it up, you just delete both those elements. Maybe shorten that guy up a little bit.

That one's fine. That one's good. Let's make this one a little shorter.

And there we are. We've completed our supply system. I'm going to go ahead and stop the video here and we'll see you in the next one.