Learn how to make adjustments and corrections while creating a duct system in a floor plan including setting appropriate parameters, installing taps, and ensuring correct system type. Master the application of VAVs in your mechanical system and become adept at manipulating the orientation and elevation of elements for optimal alignment.
Key Insights
- Attention to detail is vital in creating a duct system, from verifying parameters to choosing the right duct type and ensuring its correct alignment. Adjustments can be made throughout the process to ensure accuracy.
- Installing taps in the model requires careful consideration of the room layout and the duct’s elevation. Recognizing the right system type is crucial to avoid potential issues during the process.
- Implementing VAVs into the system involves selecting the right equipment, adjusting its elevation, and correctly aligning its position. These elements are not hosted to anything, but technically to the level, and their elevation is set off the level. This requires meticulous adjustments to ensure they align correctly with the ducts.
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Let's go back to our floor, our ceiling plan Mechanical 1. And there you go, you can go ahead and see that we see it now. So really what happened there was that when we started creating the duct, we didn't quite verify all of our parameters, and that's okay.
Again, just get it into the model, we can always adjust it and make it and change it around a little bit later. I'm going to go ahead and start to put in my taps. So I know I'm going to have like a tap for this room, tap for this room, tap for this room, tap for this room, so on and so forth.
So I'm going to go duct. In this instance, I want to go ahead and use a round duct. So I'm going to go find my round with my taps, short radius.
Notice my reference level here. And this is kind of what happened with the larger duct. My reference level is set to 2.
So I want to make sure that it says Level 1. There we go. I'm going to change my elevation, I'm going to make this the same exact height in my properties palette here as my previous duct run so that the center lines of the taps and the duct match up.
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I can go ahead, everything else is good, but darn it, I do not want it to be 48 inches. These were, I believe, 10 inches. We're going to make them 10.
And there we go. And that's going to obviously change my upper top elevation and my lower bottom elevation. I can go ahead, you can either click on the center line of the duct, or you can click here.
I'm just going to pick here, drag in, and I'm just going to drag it into the room. It's going to create the tap and notice that this is pink. Again, I'm going to Control+Z to back up, make sure that your system type is correct here.
There's one of these things that I think when people start getting into MEP, they're so overwhelmed with how many different settings there are, it just takes a little bit of getting used to and you're in the zone and going for it. So I'm going to change this to Supply Air. There we go.
Bring in. There we go. I'm just going to tap into the room.
It's as simple as just clicking between two points. So here we go. There's that.
We need one going into this room. We'll come in right here. We will come in, let's say about right there.
Let's say we'll come in a bit, we'll come in in the middle of this room. We'll come in down here. And then we'll just work our way down and get our taps into our room.
And we can always shorten this up if we needed to shorten this duct run up to go ahead and make that work better. We have our taps into our room for our supply. Oh, almost missed one here.
Make sure you get them all. And there we go. Now I want to go ahead and create my VAVs.
So I have my 10-inch duct here. We want to go ahead. Now, since that's a piece of mechanical equipment, I'm going to go here to Mechanical Equipment.
It's currently set to my rooftop unit. I'm going to pull down. I'm going to choose my VAV.
So you can see I have a VAV unit, single duct. Go ahead and use that one. I'm going to use my 10-inch.
There we go. Notice that the elevation from level is still at zero. So it's still Level 1.
I'm going to change this elevation because again, this is not a hosted element to anything. I'm going to change it to 11 feet 6 inches and we might need to look at it to see where it bases that elevation. Now, if I pick, you see it places it and the connectors are kind of in the wrong orientation.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit spacebar, hit spacebar again, because you notice that I'm going to keep hitting spacebar until I get my in coming off the tap. And I can go ahead and take a look at this and I can align with the middle of the duct. I'm going to bring my VAV in, pick, and I'm just going to place my VAVs.
Boom. I'm going to line them up with those there. Boom.
Go ahead and line it up there, line it up there. Now, when I switch over to here, I need to spin this guy around back and just work my way down. So these aren't hosted to anything.
They're technically hosted to the level. If you wanted to say they were hosted to anything, and then I set an elevation off the level. So real quickly, let's take a section and see what these look like here.
So I'm going to go here to my section tool. I'm going to draw a section right here, and I'm going to kind of constrain this section just so I only see what I want. Double-click on the section head.
There we go. So what you may notice is that the 11 feet 6 inches—well, what you'll notice first of all is that this duct does not look like a duct, does it? We drew this at 11 feet 6 inches as a 10-inch diameter duct. Well, the reason why this is represented this way is due to the detail level.
At a coarse detail level of a view, ducts are reflected as a single line diagram, and this is for documentation purposes. So coarse at medium, they start to get their size. And then here at fine, they don't change.
Pipes and conduit will get their overall size on a fine detail level. Medium is where ducts will get theirs. So you'll notice that that 11 feet 6 inches didn't really help me very much because now if I click to create a duct outlet, it's too high.
So that really goes down to the family creation. The reference, we said, hey, the middle elevation of this is 11 feet 6 inches. We said the elevation of this is 11 feet 6 inches, which is actually basing the elevation on this bottom edge of the mechanical equipment.
So what I can go ahead and do is I'm actually going to back up. I can either align, so I could go, OK, I want to align from here and I can align that. And notice it aligns those two.
Then I can find this elevation, OK, it's 10 feet 11 and 5/8 inches. That's where it's going to be. So I can go back to my ceiling plan.
I'm going to select. So that's this one. This is my 10 feet 11 and 5/8 inches.
I'm going to right-click on this, Select All Instances – Visible in View. Now notice my elevation from level says varies. I'm going to change this to 10 feet 11 and 5/8 inches.
And that's actually going to move all those down to be in line. Now that I know that those are in line, I could go ahead and just drag this to connect it to the system. So please go ahead and connect all your VAVs.
If you need to move this section around, this is what I call a working section. It's still a building section. I'm using it as a working section.
It's never going to go on a sheet, but it allows me to have a view that I can move around. And if I double-click into here, then I can see, Oh, hey, these are aligned. I can also drag this connection here because they're aligned in both plan and section.
What I'm going to do is show you guys another little trick. I'm going to go ahead and close inactive views. I still have my section open and I'm going to go to my mechanical ceiling plan.
What I'm going to end up doing here is I'm going to hit WT for Window Tile. Or if I go View and I go over to Tile Views, it's going to give me both views in the same Revit window, which is actually really helpful when working in MEP. I'm working in both plan and section at the same time.
It’s actually a very useful feature. So here, if I wanted to move this section, as I drag this section around, you'll notice how it changes. So I can go here, drag that over there.
I can also just connect these from here. Come down, go there, and I'm just going to drag and make these connections. There we go.
Keep going. And you'll notice that the snap looks a little bit different. So you can see that snap right there.
That means I'm connecting to the connector and there we are. We've placed our return diffusers. We've also placed our VAVs and connected them into the system.
Let's pause here and we'll finish connecting the rest of this up. See you soon.
