Exploring Mini Split Systems and Hood Designs for MEP Spaces in Revit

Adding Mini Split Systems and Hood Designs for MEP Spaces in Revit

Learn how to utilize the Revit MEP course mechanical in the VDCI video course content to position transfer grills, copy and rotate them, and save your work. Discover the practical steps to align transfer grills to the current view, populate them in each classroom, and use different commands to achieve a similar goal.

Key Insights

  • Placing transfer grills in the Revit MEP course mechanical involves copying and rotating them, selecting both, and hitting R O for rotate, then rotating by 90 degrees. This can be done vertically or horizontally.
  • The process of aligning the grills to the current view involves selecting both grills, copying to clipboard, and then pasting from the clipboard. The standard copy command does not allow items to be taken between views, hence the need to use the clipboard.
  • The move, copy, and align commands in Revit all facilitate the positioning of grills in different rooms. These tasks all serve the same goal but offer flexibility in their implementation based on user preference.

Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.

Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for the Revit MEP course mechanical. In the previous video, we went ahead and started finishing up some of these transfer grills. We're going to go ahead and finish those up now.

So what I need to go ahead and do is I kind of need to give a couple other ones to allow this air to flow out. But I want to kind of give a couple that are horizontal or vertically oriented. So I'm going to take these one of these two, I'm going to copy it up.

Right, I'm not worried about where it is right now. And then I'm going to rotate these two. So again, I copy those up, I select both of them again, hit R O for rotate, and just rotate by 90 degrees.

And then here, I can just grab them and move them over as such. And then I'm going to do the same thing, take these two, copy. I'm just going to kind of pick a point again, I kind of like to get that midpoint that's along the wall of the center line of the diffuser and then place up there.

Now I've kind of allowed those two rooms, I can go ahead and also probably put one between these two offices and these two offices. So I'm going to take another one of these here, copy them. So again, select, hold CTRL select C O for copy, take that midpoint, place one down here, place one here.

Learn Revit MEP

  • Nationally accredited
  • Create your own portfolio
  • Free student software
  • Learn at your convenience
  • Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

And there we go. I'm going to go ahead hit escape to end that. And there we go.

Make sure you save. I accidentally escaped out of that little save window, you might have seen that pop up. Great.

Now what I need to go and do is I need to take this and I believe we probably need to put it on the second floor. Yep. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm actually going to do a different type of copy.

I'm going to select both of these. And I'm going to come up here and go copy to clipboard. And what copy to clipboard will allow me to do is it'll allow me to paste to a different view.

Just using the standard copy command does not allow me to really take items between views. So I'm going to go here so that I have those selected, copy to clipboard. I'm going to come up to my ceiling to mechanical working.

And I'm just going to go ahead hit paste from clipboard. And here we go. And it didn't really put it in the right location.

So you may have noticed that when I pulled down here on paste, there's many different options. On this one, I could use a line to current view. So I'm going to go paste a line to current view.

There we go. And there we are. So it placed in the same exact spot, but just at the level of that is hosted to this view.

Cool. Now I'm going to take these, I'm going to copy, and I'm just going to go around and populate them. It's kind of repetitive, but it's sometimes what you need to do with the MEP scope of work.

So I'm just work my way around placing them in each of the classrooms. I'm trying to kind of be a little bit, you know, in the same locations, but we'll work on that. It doesn't have to necessarily be perfect.

Just working my way around. Obviously, each room has slightly slight differences with regard to the, uh, where, where the main trunk line is coming in to serve the room. Are there any other ones I need to go ahead and put in? We'll go ahead and throw one in here.

There we go. We could even throw another one right here if we so wanted to. I can tell though, that this one is on a wall.

It's a little thinner. It's okay if these overlap. These guys, the guys in the field, they'll work that out.

There we go. Oh, and I should probably put one in the resources and the counselor. So I'm going to take these two, copy them, take it up, put there, because we're doing all of this as Plenum.

Counselor space. There's this wall. Yeah.

You might need to come back in. You can use the arrow keys to go ahead and move it around. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of that because it's not exact.

I usually like to use the move command and get it in exactly the right location. I could also use the align command AL for a line pick there and then pick there, you know, which edge I want to align. There's a lot of different options.

And as you start to use Revit more and more, you'll kind of find your own option in your own way that you kind of like to do the workflow, even though you are getting to the same overall goal, the move, the copy, the align, they're all kind of a tasking and doing the same goal. Pretty good. Great.

We wouldn't have got these guys copied up. So what I want to go ahead and do now is I'm going to return back to my ceiling one mechanical. And what we're going to end up doing is we're going to start looking at some of these smaller rooms.

So you see, we have the electrical room here. So the electrical room is typically not served by a lot of ducted. And this kind of goes for a lot of, uh, uh, electrical rooms, it rooms, and maybe some other offshoots.

Um, so smaller, maybe support spaces that are around, but they're not really serviced necessarily by a duct system. They can be, but traditionally they're a separate system. Electrical equipment generates heat that he needs to be cooled.

So what typically ends up happening is they like to put what is called a mini split system where you have a fan coil that is mounted to the wall and then some kind of condensing unit outside. And we're going to take a look at the families for that. That is from a manufacturer.

Uh, they're part of your downloaded files and we'll take a look at those. And then we have the cafeteria here. So in the cafeteria, we have obviously a large space, but we're going to be focusing mainly on the kitchen and looking at potentially like, what would a hood start to look like in this area? We'll take a look at a manufacturer spec page and kind of look at that.

So let's go ahead first and take a peek at a family, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to load in the two families we're going to use. We're going to be placing for the electrical room here, we're going to be placing a mini split, and then we'll need to go ahead and place a condensing unit or remote condenser somewhere on the roof, somewhere that is accessible that can be, you know, traditionally they're serviced by refrigerant lines. If you have been in the mechanical field before, you're probably very familiar with them.

Uh, and everything I'm saying, you might be going, wait, what? So, uh, but they're pretty simple systems. They typically have a supply and return refrigerant line that goes to a wall mounted, uh, fan coil system. And then that, that remote condenser sits maybe on the roof by other mechanical equipment so that it can go ahead and, uh, cool the air.

So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to load these two families and I'm going to load both the families in and we're going to talk about a few things and take some time to really look at them. So let's go ahead. Let's go to insert.

I'm going to go up to a load family. It's not an Autodesk family. It's just a regular load family because this is something we've downloaded from a manufacturer load family.

It takes me to this location. I'm going to go to my documents folder. I'm going to go to VDCI here.

I'm going to go to my file downloads and families and references. You should see HC air conditioner indoor unit, and you should see HC heat pump, MEP content, so on and so forth. The one thing just to start off this conversation, the one thing is, is a lot of times these names are really long and really wild.

I understand what they're trying to do by trying to get many stuff in there so that you know what you're looking at. Sometimes I've found that maybe simplifying the names, you know, this gets really long in the project browser and we'll look at that. Um, but sometimes simplifying these names, renaming these files can be a big thing.

The other thing I want to take a quick peek at is if we start to look at these families, let's look at the size of the families. And this is one thing that you kind of want to be aware of when you're downloading content from manufacturers. You want to make sure that the file size isn't severely bloated or overly large, large families that are brought into Revit files can wreak havoc.

I've seen files just completely stop working. So you want to make sure that these files are kind of cleaned. These files are pretty good.

They're pretty small. We're going to go ahead and use them. I'm going to select both.

If I click here, hold control, click there, I'm going to load both of these families in open. You might very commonly, when you download families from a manufacturer, they may not be the same Revit version that you are currently using. It's perfectly fine to upgrade them, let them upgrade, and it'll be good to go.

But usually manufacturers build their Revit families. Either they've had them built a long time ago, or if they're new, they'll build them a couple versions back. Because again, Revit is not backwards compatible.

So I don't want to build something and say Revit 2024. And then I have a someone, I have a client who wants to use it and say 23 or 22, maybe because the project is in that year, I want to give the flexibility. If someone's still using an older version of the software due to, you know, office policy, they haven't decided to jump to the next version of the software yet, or the newest version yet, or they are, they are working on maybe possibly an older project that is just not going to get upgraded, because that's a lot of work for not a lot of payoff.

I want to make sure those families are there. We've loaded those in, you can see if I expand out families, and I go down to mechanical equipment, we have quite a bit here. But you can see these kind of crazy long names, HC air conditioner, HC heat pump, what I'm going to go and do here is we're going to look at these families.

And I'm going to pause this video here. And then we'll get started looking at these individual families. See that

photo of Tyler Grant

Tyler Grant

Revit MEP Instructor


Tyler Grant is a BIM Manager a Delawie. A dedicated, goal-oriented, and experienced architect. Tyler has managed multiple design/build BIM projects from inception to construction completion, through all phases. Technology-driven and experienced educator to train and instruct users, both novice and advanced, in the workflow and processes of the modern architecture, engineering, and construction field. 

More articles by Tyler Grant

How to Learn Revit MEP

Specialize in MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing) systems within Revit for advanced design solutions.

Yelp Facebook LinkedIn YouTube Twitter Instagram