Automatically creating panel schedules in Revit can optimize your work process, as it offers options to modify circuit descriptions, rebalance loads, and update ratings. This article discusses the process of creating panel schedules and making adjustments in Revit, such as moving circuit descriptions up and down, adding notes, and renaming circuits.
Key Insights
- Revit allows the automatic creation of panel schedules with connected circuits, which can be accessed through the Analyze tab.
- There are several options available for panel boards in Revit including moving circuit descriptions up and down, rebalancing loads, and updating ratings, main types, and other information as necessary.
- Working on panel boards in Revit also involves renaming circuits, which can be done through the system browser and power plans, allowing you to visually see where circuits are located and how they should be named.
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Here is the most exciting part. Now that we have our circuits connected in Revit, we can automatically create panel schedules. To do that, we'll go up to the Analyze tab.
It's kind of in a different location than we're used to for schedules. We'll go to Analyze, look across and find the panel schedules. Click that, and it will let us schedule all of the available panels.
Now we have four panel boards. We'll check them all, PB1 through 4, and click OK. And just like that, we have our four panel boards set up.
Now our PB1 we're looking at right now, we have a couple of options. Number one, we can select on any of our circuit descriptions and we can move them up and down. There's a move up, move down button.
You can see how easy it is to click move up, move down. We can also move these across. We can see this one doesn't have a name.
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This one's called lighting. We move across and they switch places. Now let's keep going here.
We can do a couple of other things that are automatic and fun. We look at the bottom. We have some different loads on our A, B, and C phases.
A has 18, B has 12 amps, and C has 23 amps. If we click the rebalance load button at the top, Revit will think a moment and rebalance our loads for us. And now they're all 17 amps.
It doesn't always get it exactly equal, but it tries and gets it pretty close. We can also update any of the information we need to. We can add ratings, main type.
We can change the main rating. Any of this information is editable here in Revit. We can even add some notes about this panel board.
So PB1, and we can add some extra notes about it. Now let's go ahead and double click on PB3 in our project browser and take a look. Now this one, we added up to 42 available slots.
So it's a more full panel board, more going on here. And for example, if we want to have the receptacles classroom grouped together, we can do that. We can click the move up and start to organize these so that all the classroom receptacle circuits are at the top of our panel board here.
We can get super organized and place everything where we'd like it to be. There we go. So I'm moving some of these up from the bottom all the way through.
You can see that can kind of move through the others just by clicking move up several times, we can get these to go where we'd like them to go. Now we noticed that some of these don't have a circuit description, and that means that when we created these, we didn't put that description in, and they're more likely the ones that were existing and unnamed. So how do we rectify that? How do we give these a description? What we'll need to do is look in our browser and find our power plans and lighting plans.
So start by going to our power plans, floor plan, power plan, L1 power plan. So I'll double click there, and I want to open up my electrical systems browser here, and I can see that here. Here's my browser.
Let's find one of these. So I'm going to go back to my PB1, and I'll notice that PB1 currently, circuit one has no name here, no circuit description. So I'm going to find it in two places.
Number one, the system browser, and number two, my power plan. So let's open up the power plan, system browser side by side. I recall it was panel board one, PB1, and then we have circuit one, and it didn't have a name.
So number one, I can rename it here. So right here, if I have it selected in the system browser, I can look across to the properties of that circuit and give it a name. I can tell it's lighting because I can see it's lighting here, and so I can just switch it out to lighting.
But I might also want to have my plans opened up because I can visually see where that's at to give it a better name. This is lighting, so I'll go ahead and go to my L1 lighting plan, and you can see that circuit selected. It's hard to see until I zoom in, but here it is.
It's a circuit right here, number one. And what is it? It's the lights for my electrical room of all places. So that's my circuit one, and I've just given it a name.
We can go through and make sure we have names for everything in our panel schedules. We can see now if we go back to PB1, it now says lighting because we've added that. Let's do one more, and so let's look across here.
Let's see number 12. Circuit 12 on panel board one doesn't have a name, so let's click on that circuit 12. It also has lighting, so without even looking at the plan, we can simply update its load name to lighting.
It's gonna be pretty easy to populate this. Now, the other way to go about it is to just type it in right here. It's a little bit more dangerous if we're not sure what it is.
I like to verify in the system browser and maybe the plans to make sure I'm renaming it correctly. And that's it. We can get this all set up and have some really nice panel board schedules.
