Creating a Water Heater Family in Revit MEP: A Step-by-Step Guide

Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for Revit MEP for plumbing. In the previous videos, we went ahead and finished up our hot and cold water systems. And what I want to go ahead and do now is transition a little bit away from piping.

Now that we've done some piping, and piping isn't too terribly hard, especially level pressure pipes such as these. When we get into slope piping, it'll be a little bit more difficult, but it's just a specific workflow. But we want to go ahead and let's kind of talk a little bit about families.

We're going to talk about our water heater family, which we're going to actually go ahead and build. And then we'll talk about some of our other fixtures and the ways that we have of bringing in either the architect's fixtures and what those are, or populating our own. So let's start off with our mechanical room and our water heater.

So there are manufacturer families out there that you can go purchase, or not purchase, excuse me, but download. They want you to download their families so that you specify their equipment. It's really kind of nice.

And we do recommend, you know, if you have a specific manufacturer, your company wants to use those, those are more than viable to use. As long as they're kind of clean, some of them can kind of be overburdening on a model. They have a lot of information that you may or may not need.

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And actually I have one real quickly in your folder. So what I'm going to do is open this up real quick. So I'm going to go file and I'm going to go open.

And I'm going to open up in my VDCI, my file downloads, my BIM 322 file downloads, families and references. You should have this BIM object, universal gas, commercial water heaters, 35 to a hundred gallon, click into that folder and go ahead and open this up. And we're just going to take a quick peek at this family.

It is a 2015 version. So it's going to go ahead and take a little bit, you know, if he upgrades it, that's perfectly fine. We're not going to worry about it, but you can see there's a lot going on here.

So let's talk about a family in the terms of Revit, but maybe more specifically to a Revit MEP family. So I'm going to go into my 3D view here real quick. And notice I have all this text.

These are all different parameters that are the locations of different outlets or inlets or the spacing for the top connection there. I'm going to change the view scale here to be like, say a quarter of an inch. So just so that my text will go like an inch equals a foot, just so my text is a lot smaller and makes it easier to see.

So there's a lot happening. By default, Revit families are created of extrusions and or voids. So really what this big circle here is, this is just a big extrusion.

If I edit this extrusion, you can see it's just a circle on the ground. It does have a parameter in there for a tank radius. And this family has a few different nested elements that come

From a type catalog or a text file that will go ahead and allow you to choose between the different sizes.

Notice this is G37 to G100. Well, the G obviously stands for gallons, and it can go from a 37-gallon water heater to a 100-gallon water heater is what they create for this one. I'm just going to hit OK on that.

That's OK. I didn't change anything. You have this little model group here.

We can kind of see what this is. So again, this is something that maybe in the terms of the family, you don't really need. If I edit this group, let's see what this element is.

So this is just line work. It's nothing super crazy. It's just lines, and they've decided to group it together so that it moves as one piece.

And it's also pinned in place. So as you can see, I can move it around as a group, and it's there. We'll just go ahead and repin that.

We have our extrusions. It seems like they have another element down here. This is just another extrusion that they have.

The vents are actually made up of just lines. When you look at this in elevation, it does look like there's little vents there, but this is really just a box with line work. You have here, we have another little box here.

Again, just another piece that is probably some kind of power aspect or anything. We can probably look at this connector and see that this is a gallon per minute. So it is a mechanical connector.

But what you can see here, so you see all these little circles where the power is, is this guy right here. So this is a connector element for your electrical loads so that the electrical could take this and connect to it if they so desired. You can also see we have a whole bunch of different connectors out on the sides here.

We have a radius, radius, so on and so forth. These are different water connectors here. You can see the system classification is hydronic supply.

So you have those. Now, you may notice that each of these connectors have their own little extrusion that they pop off of. And that's because a face of an extrusion or a face of a solid in the terms of a Revit family can only be on, or that face of the solid can only have one connector on it.

So the reason why they have to have all these little tabs or all these little extrusions is so that they can have multiple connectors. So you can see here, I have all these different connectors up here. You'll notice I have a mechanical duct connector.

If I can get the actual mechanical duct connector, this is for my exhaust air system. So obviously when this creates heat and heated water, it has to exhaust the hot air out. That is that exhaust connection.

So you can see there's a lot of coordination that kind of has to happen when in terms of mechanical equipment or plumbing equipment, we have electrical connectors, we have water connectors, and we have mechanical connectors for our exhaust air. So this seems to be like a fairly decent family, but we're going to go ahead and build our own. It's not too terribly hard, and I want to get us some practice in building our own families.

So take a look at this, but there are a lot of the different manufacturers, they do make their own water heater, uh, families. Uh, and you know, you can check with the rep there, or there are websites like BIMobject that have those. Um, you know, typically I like to get them directly from the manufacturer.

Those tend to be a little bit better quality, but BIMobject isn't a terrible, I would just avoid things like Revit City, which is user generated content. And it's not necessarily bad content per se, but it can be bloated with imported CAD. You really don't want to have imported CAD in your Revit families.

It bloats the size of your file, makes everything run slow. Um, so you really want to make sure that your families are really kind of nice, clean, and small. I'm going to go ahead and close out of this, and then close on that one, and don't worry about saving it.

I'm just going to go ahead and hit no. So to create this family, and we're going to kind of create a simplified version of this family. The nice thing about creating your own families is that you only create what you really need to visualize it.

For us, it's going to be just kind of a, um, an extrusion, a cylinder extrusion with a specific size, similar to the size of the one that we saw there. And we're going to put a couple of water connectors on there, and we'll go from that. Perfect.

So what I'm going to go and do is I'm going to go file new. I'm going to go here to new, and I'm going to choose family from here. I want to choose the correct template.

So you can see, I have my English Imperial. I'm in, it automatically pops me in there. Now I could go down here and I could choose mechanical equipment.

I would want to choose this as either mechanical equipment. There's a couple of different ways you can go about this, and this is kind of deciding on what category that you want this to go into. It could go into mechanical equipment because it's a larger piece of equipment.

I guess there could be an argument for plumbing fixture, but when I think of plumbing fixture, I tend to think of things like sinks, drinking fountains, uh, hose bibs, those kinds of items. So I don't really so much think of this as a plumbing fixture as, as a more so a piece of mechanical equipment, mainly because it also has electrical requirements and it has exhaust requirements. You could also, I suppose, do it as a piece of specialty equipment as the category, um, but it doesn't really fall very well into specialty equipment.

When I think of specialty equipment, I'm thinking more like maybe some kind of industrial equipment, woodworking, a table saw, a band saw, scroll saw, um, or maybe some kind of lab stuff. A computer could be electrical or specialty equipment can also be electrical equipment if you want to get into that. So there's sometimes a little bit of user choice when it comes to creating this family for what I'm going to go ahead and do.

And what I've typically seen most people do is they go ahead and use mechanical equipment. Now you can always change this category later on. If your, if your company decides, Hey, we don't want that under mechanical equipment.

We want it under plumbing fixtures, or we want it under specialty equipment. You can always change the category later on. So let's go ahead and select mechanical equipment.

We don't want it to be ceiling based or wall based. We just want it to be level hosted in a sense. And we're going to choose mechanical equipment.

I'm going to go ahead and hit open, and that's going to start my, uh, family. Let's go ahead and save this family. So I'm going to go to file save as family.

Let's go ahead. I'm going to go back into my pull down, go to my, uh, where is it? I'm going to go to this PC. I'm going to go to my documents, my VDCI folder, or wherever you have your VDCI folder by BIM 322.

Let's go to the families and references. And I'm going to go ahead and name this BIM 322 dash water heater. And I put BIM 322, or you may put your company name just to say, Hey, this is manual.

You know, this is one's created by us. I'm going to hit save. And there we go.

Now I want to go ahead and start on this. I'm going to create an extrusion. So I'm going to start off with my extrusion.

And again, we're going to use solids to create this. So I can go here to extrusion. I'm going to go into my circle tool.

So I go circle. I'm going to click on the intersection here and drag out. I want to make this about, Oh, I would say maybe a 13 inch radius.

So I'm going to zero space 13. So it's about 20,26 inches wide enter. So, or one foot one, and I hit finish.

And that's really all it's going to need. Realistically, how I need to represent this on a plan is I just need to have the actual cylinder being shown. And then I could tag it.

I can append data to it to say, Hey, this cylinder is a water heater. I don't need the manufacturer name on it. I don't need a lot of that information.

I'm going to go ahead and go to my front view to establish the height of it. Now, if I wanted this height to be parametric, I'd want to go ahead and put in a reference plane. So let's go ahead and do that.

I'm going to go to create tab. I'm going to put in a reference plane here and I'm just going to draw it. I'm not worried about the exact location of it yet.

And I hit escape. Now I can align my cylinder to that there. So I'm going to go up to my modify tab.

I'm going to go to align, select my reference plane, select the extrusion and lock and make sure that you lock it. You always want to, when building families, you always want to go ahead and actually create reference planes, align and lock to those reference planes. So your parameters aren't really changing.

When we establish this height parameter, we're not really assigning it to the solid. We're actually assigning it to the reference plane rather than the solid. We can go ahead and create that dimension, which is then going to establish that parameter.

I'm going to go over to my annotate tab. I'm going to go to aligned. I'm going to tab select until I get the reference plane here.

And I'm going to come up here. Notice I'm selecting the reference plane and not the actual extrusion. Pick there.

Here we go. So you can see it's five foot 11 and 15 sixteenths at this moment. I can go ahead, select this, and let's say I wanted to make it say six foot six.

That might be based on my manufacturer cut sheet. And I want to assign a height parameter to this. So I could select this guy.

I'm going to come up to create parameter. So once I select the dimension, it gives me this contextual tab. I can create a parameter here.

So I'm going to create that parameter. I'm going to name it height. I'm going to have it be a type parameter.

It's going to be grouped under dimensions, and it's a family parameter. I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. And there we go.

When you want to create a parameter for this radius, this is this one gets kind of weird. Dealing with parameters assigned to radiuses can be a little bit different, but let's go ahead and give it a shot. So I'm going to go back to my floor plan.

Where I need to assign this is actually in the sketch of the extrusion. So I'm going to select my extrusion and hit edit extrusion. If you remember, we had that one foot one radius pop up.

If I wanted to show that one foot one, I could click on this little guy right here. And that actually makes that a dimension. So again, when I select this, currently this is listed as a temporary dimension.

I can pick here, click that, and that makes it an actual dimension. I'm going to select this guy and do the same thing here. Create parameter.

I'm going to go to my name and my name is tank radius. Give it type under dimensions. Everything there is good.

Hit OK. I could also go back and rename my height to be tank height if I wanted to be a little more descriptive. And there we go.

If I change it to say, let's say two feet, see how that goes there. Now you may notice that I didn't assign this to a reference point. That's kind of because when you get into the circular dimensions and those kind of items, you can't really do that.

You can't really assign it to a reference plane since reference planes are orthogonal. So you have to establish it in this instance. I'm going to go ahead and finish.

If I go and look at my, my family types now, you'll see I have two new parameters. I have a height and I have a tank radius. If I were to say again, change this to two feet and I hit apply, notice how it changes in size.

Once one foot one. There we go. Hit apply.

And there we are. We have everything kind of there as we knew we could add other parameters. I'm actually going to rename this to be tank height.

So to rename a parameter here, I'm going to select that. I'm going to go edit here and then I'm going to just put in tank height. Hit okay.

Hit apply. Hit okay. And there we go.

Let's go ahead and make sure that we save this. I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here. In the next video, we'll come back and we'll add in our connectors.

See you then.