Developing a detailed electrical model often requires proper organization of the information into schedules. This article explains how to create an organized light fixture schedule using the Revit software, including procedures for filtering and sorting data, renaming columns, and updating all light fixtures simultaneously.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on creating a light fixture schedule in Revit, starting with filtering electrical items to selecting light fixtures and adding necessary data such as the type mark, family, type, count, wattage, apparent power, illuminance, initial color temperature, lamp type, and manufacturer data.
- Once all light fixtures are listed, the data can be distilled by sorting groupings, primarily by the type mark. The list can be further reduced to display only one of each light fixture type. The article also highlights how to rename columns for better clarity.
- A unique feature of Revit is the ability to update all light fixtures in the model simultaneously. An example given is changing the initial color temperature for all lights to a specific value. The change will affect all light fixtures in the model, demonstrating the efficiency and power of Revit.
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Now that we've completed our Revit electrical model, we can organize that information into schedules. Let's start by creating a light fixture schedule. We'll do that by going to our View tab, looking for Schedules, and we want Schedule Quantities.
We can filter this list and select out only the electrical items, and then we can find our lighting fixtures. With Lighting Fixtures selected, we click OK, and now we can add the data for our light fixtures. We want to add first the type mark.
This will give us basically an ID column. Then we want to add in the family. This will describe what each light fixture is, and then we want to add in the type.
This will give us more details about the light fixture. After the type, we want to add the count. We want to understand how many of each light fixture we have in our project.
After that, we want wattage. This is the bulb wattage, and then we want the apparent power. After that, we want the illuminance, how much light this light fixture is giving off.
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Then we want the initial color temperature, and this will show what the color of each light is. Then we want our lamp, essentially the lamp type, and then we want some manufacturer data. So manufacturer, and then we'll put in a URL, and click OK.
Now Revit pulls up all of the light fixtures in our entire project, and we have quite a few. So let's go ahead and distill this data down. On the left, in the properties window, we want the sorting groupings.
We'll click sorting grouping, edit, and we want to sort by primarily our type mark. So type mark, ascending, and then we can add some grand totals, and we do not need to itemize every instance. It's currently showing every lighting device, and we don't need that.
We'll uncheck itemize every instance. We're just seeing one of each light fixture, and with that sorting grouping all sorted out, we will click OK, and we'll see that list shrink down to just the lighting fixtures that we have. Now from here, we can create some updates.
First, we can rename the columns. For example, instead of type mark, we can put ID, and instead of family, we can put lighting fixture, and then instead of type, we can put fixture type, and we can make changes to any column we wish. We can also update the data, and the cool thing is if we update it here, it will update all of the light fixtures in the model.
For example, the initial color temperature, we're kind of all over the board right now. Let's say we want to have all of the lights in our project to be 3000K, and when we say Enter, click Enter on the keyboard, it's going to notify us that this will change. It will be applied to all of the light fixtures.
There are 120 of our 2x2 fixtures, and they're all going to update, and that's okay. We want them to all update, and I can repeat that change for all of my light fixtures if I'd like, and set them all to 3000K temperature. A quick note on color temperature, this is the color of the light, essentially the light quality, so a really high number like 6000K would be like a blue-colored light, and a really low value like 2000 would be a more yellow-colored light, so a 3000-colored light would be kind of in the middle, a little bit more towards the yellow end, or in other words, towards the warm end.
6000K would be up at the cool end of that spectrum. Over here in the lamp category, we can have these all be LED or any lamp type we'd like, but in our case, we'll go with LED bulbs, and for manufacturer, we can create a manufacturer. We're not going to pick on any specific manufacturer here, but we can add a manufacturer if we'd like, so I'm just going to call mine West Coast Lighting Company, and that will add it to all the fixtures.
We can add a URL. It could be www.westcoastlights.com, and then our next fixture, we could go with that same theme and call it East Coast Light Company, and www.eastcoastlights.com, and you could continue that on down, adding manufacturers for all the lights, completing all of the data. If we expand this chart, let's see, if we go back to sorting and grouping and itemize every instance, we'll notice that these changes apply to every light, so it's pretty cool, very powerful way to edit all of the lights, update their information all at once.
Let's go back and remove that itemize every instance, and we're looking pretty good here with our data. We could continue to fill it out, but let's adjust its appearance next, so under the properties of our schedule, we have the appearance button. We'll click edit, and right here in appearance, we can adjust some of the graphics and text.
For example, we can increase the title size if we'd like, and let's go ahead and do a three-eighths title, and then the header text, let's do one-quarter inch. We'll leave the body text default, and then we can have some fun and add striped rows, so in the graphics area, there's striped rows. We check that box, and then we'll leave that color.
It's just kind of a gray color, and that's fine. We'll leave that default, and we'll click okay here, and we'll notice a couple of changes. First, the lighting picture schedule text got bigger at the top, and we have those stripes, so I think that's looking really good.
We have a lighting picture schedule, so we'll come back in a moment and create more schedules.
