Modeling Electrical Conduit Connections Between Panel Boards and Equipment in Revit

We’re going to take that and just click and drag it down, and it needs to go to the elevator. We'll take it down the hall, carrying the motor down the hall, and we'll zoom in here. I took it a little bit too far with my dragging.

It’s almost in that wall. I want to bring it back to the elevator. Let’s just put it right there on our elevator.

And there it is.

So, let’s go up to our systems tab while we’re in the electrical room view, and we will find the conduit button in the electrical area. When we click that conduit button, we have several options. First off, we have in our properties several types.

If we pull that down, we see we have conduit, we have electrical metallic tubing, rigid metal conduit, and then we also have conduit without fittings. If we have fittings such as couplers and pipes, we can do that. Let’s just say this is bent tubing.

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It’s set to two-and-a-half inches right now. Let’s change that to 1.5 inches. And it doesn’t want to do that.

We need to pick from the trade sizes. If we pull this down, we can select 1.5 inches and we’ll be good to go. We can click apply, knowing that that middle elevation is about nine feet.

So, apply. And so, we’re going to draw this because of that middle elevation, about nine feet in the air, some metal tubing. We’ll start over the main distribution board and connect to panel board one.

I just want to click somewhere up above. So maybe right here. I’m just drawing that conduit line.

So it’s going to go to the corner, click again, and then go straight down. And I’ll stop somewhere over panel board one. Click.

Now go back to modify because I’m done. What did Revit do for me automatically? Number one, it created a bend and it created these two lines. So let’s look at our elevation to see what’s going on.

We have our little elevations here in the middle of the room. I’m going to start by looking at the main distribution board. So I’ll double click that elevation.

And here is my conduit. Now it’s just a thin line. So it’s kind of hard to see.

Why is that? That’s because I’m in course mode. I can change that down to medium, still see a line. But if I change it down to fine, now I can see the tubing as well as some other details that come in through Revit.

So there is my conduit. Now it’s floating up above the equipment and I want to drag some lines down to our equipment and specifically to the main distribution board right now, because that’s the view I’m looking at. To do that, I will click on my conduit and I’ll see these little ends.

I get a dot here and one here. The dot on the right, I can right click and say draw conduit. And now I can draw a conduit down.

And on purpose, I’m going to draw it kind of short and click again. And I get an error. No autoroute solution was found.

And that’s because Revit wants to do a bend in the conduit. And if it’s too short, it can’t do it. So, I’m just going to say cancel, and we’ll try it again.

Click modify, select the conduit, right click on the right dot and click draw conduit. This time I’ll drag it down, but I don’t want to drag it to the top of my distribution board. If I do that, they will connect.

And that seems cool. But the problem with connecting conduit directly to the equipment is that they become rigid. And if I move the equipment or move the conduit, they move together as one block.

I don’t want to do that. So, I’ll stop just shy of the top of that board. Click and there it is.

Revit puts in the bend and all the conduit I need. I’ll click modify to exit edit mode. And I’ll notice that my conduit stops just short of it.

Well, I don’t want to drag it down because it’s going to connect it. Let me show you what it does. You don’t have to do this, but I’ll show you.

If I connect to there, it opens up this whole other window and it shows me the top of the distribution. It’s going to connect and there’s the top of the board. It’s pretty sophisticated, the connection, but I don’t want to do that.

I’m going to say cancel because it’ll be hard connected. Instead, I want to use the align tool. So, AL for align or modify tab align.

I can click the top of the distribution board and click my conduit and now they’re aligned. So, they touch, but they’re not connected as far as Revit is concerned. Now I’ll click modify and there I go.

I’m now connected to the main distribution board. I’m going to go back to my electrical room and now click on this elevation where I’m looking at the panel boards. So, double click.

I’m looking at the panel boards and again, everything is just aligned right now. I’m going to change my type to fine. And with fine, now I can see that conduit.

I’ll click on this run. That left button or left dot, I will right click and say draw conduit. And straight down to the panel board, but I don’t want to touch, just barely not touching.

And back to modify. Revit puts in the bend and I can use the align tool, AL to align, to align that top. And now I’m set.

I’ve got conduit between the main distribution board and the panel board and it’s a half-inch conduit. One and a half-inch conduit. All right, let’s go back to the electrical room and do some more.

So there’s that first run and here I can see the green dots. Everything is good and the beauty of not connecting these directly to the boards is I can just make some changes. I can click, for example, this run and even use my arrow keys to move it over.

It doesn’t affect anything except for that conduit run. So, I want to do another one over to panel board two. So, let’s go back to conduit.

And it’s still set to EMT, which is perfect. It changed the middle elevation though, down to five foot two. And let’s say I want to go even higher this time.

So, I’m at nine feet with the last one. Let’s say I want to do nine feet, six inches, and it’s still set to one and a half inches diameter. Remembers that from the last time and click apply.

And now I can start my run. I’m going to start right here, the main distribution board. I’m going to click just kind of willy-nilly out in front of this other conduit because I can move it later.

Come over to the corner and then go down to about where panel board two is and click again. Now I can click modify and there’s that conduit. I’ll look at the distribution board again by double clicking the elevation.

I’ll click on the conduit, right click on this dot, draw a conduit, drag it down almost to touching, but not quite. I’ll use my align tool to align it. Then I’ll go back to my electrical room plan and I’ll look at the panel board two.

Looking at panel board two, I can select that conduit, right click over the left dot and click draw a conduit all the way down to almost touching. I will use the align tool to align it to the top of panel board two. Now I’ll go back to my electrical room.

And now that I’ve got it, you can see I didn’t quite have it over the panel board and distribution board. That was to avoid confusion. Now I can drag this over and align it on top of the other one and do the same thing here.

Align it on top of the one below it. There we go. Now connected distribution board to panel board one and now panel board two.

Let’s repeat that process for three and four. We’ll go pretty quick. So I’m going to go over to the systems tab, go to conduit, distribution board, to the corner, over to three, hit escape.

I’m going to do another one as long as we’re here. Let’s see. I’m going to click, oh, and I forgot to change it.

That one’s at five foot two. That’s okay. Let’s put the next one at 10 feet six.

Now click here, click there. It’s not showing it. That’s interesting.

Panel board four. Okay. It says none of the elements created could be seen in this view.

That’s okay. We’ll come back and fix that in a moment. Let’s go look at our distribution board.

Okay, so I’ve got this panel, this conduit way down here. Not a problem.

I can select it and change the middle elevation to 10 feet and click apply. It’s going to jump the whole thing up to 10 feet. There it is.

Now I can right click on this dot and I can say, draw a conduit straight down. It’s kind of hard to see because it’s close to that conduit. So I’m going to go just partially down and now I’ll use the align tool to align it at the top.

Perfect. Now this conduit here, I will right click, draw a conduit, take it straight down, not all the way. And I’ll use my align tool to align it to the top.

Okay. It’s a little bit messy, but we’ll fix it in a moment. Let’s go back to the electrical room and look at our panel boards.

Got those conduits up in the air here. So I can click on this one, right click, draw a conduit down to panel board three. This one, right click, draw a conduit down to panel board four, use my align tool, align to the tops of the panel boards, and I’m pretty set.

Now I’m going to go back to my electrical room. Now I’ll notice that I can see kind of the end of these, but I can’t see the full run. That’s because my view doesn’t go that high.

I’m looking a little bit lower. So let’s go nothing is selected. I want just my power plan, the electrical room and its properties.

I can change the view range. I’ll click view range, edit, and what’s the top it’s 10 feet. So anything above 10 feet, I can’t see.

I’ll change that to 12 feet, go up quite a bit higher, click okay. And now I can see these full runs. And now I just drag the straight lines of the conduit over to align them with the others, to clean it all up.

There we go. And now these are out in place. I can drag these in.

I kind of made a mistake and didn’t line these up. So maybe I’ll back to this view here. And this one needs to move over quite a bit.

And this guy needs to move over to here so that nothing is overlapping. There we go. Back to electrical room.

And now that I’ve moved them over, I can align them by dragging the straight runs, click and drop, click and drop. And now I can see the main distribution board is connected to the four panels and I can leave it like this with the course view. I can change it to fine.

If I’d like it to look like this, more like the tubing, or I’ll just go back to the course. That’s okay with me. Okay.

So there it is. If I want to do one more because I’m having fun, I can add in the run for the transformer. That one’s a bit tricky because it’s going to go wrap this whole room.

So I’m going to go back to my systems. I’m going to go to conduit and I’ll start on the main distribution board, maybe over here. So it doesn’t conflict, come into this corner, come down all the way to the bottom of the room, and then over to the step-up transformer, click modify.

And I will now look at this. Well, first I want to click on its elevation. It’s set to 5’2”, so I want to change that to, let’s go above everything else.

I think we’re now at maybe 11 feet or so. We’ll do 11’2”, just to see where it lands. And now we’ll take a look at it at the distribution board.

So there it is up in the sky. Let’s see, this one is at 10’6”. I did 11’2”, it could just be at 11 feet, 11 feet.

And on the right side, I will right-click and draw a conduit, draw it straight down, use my align tool, align to the top. Okay, that one’s all set. Maybe I move it over so they’re kind of in the same spacing.

Go back to my electrical room. I don’t really need to look at the panel board view. That’s just a straight run.

I’m going to look at the transformer view. So double-click that one. And so this is set up still in course.

I’m going to change it to fine. And there it is way up high near the ceiling coming across. I’ll select it, right-click, and I’ll draw a conduit straight down, use my align tool, align it to the top of this transformer.

Now I’ll go back to the electrical room and I can move this line over to here. So everything lines up. And I’ll drag this line up here.

So those line up as well. And I’m all set. Everything is connected.

And those lines look pretty nice. So I don’t need to have these arc lines anymore. So I will select them and delete them.

It affects nothing here to delete those. They’re just visual. Everything is still connected in the system browser.

I can just click, delete, click, delete. I don’t need these anymore. I now have that all set up.

Now, speaking of coordination, now that we have this conduit in here, imagine if we also had a data cable tray running through our electrical room. We want to make sure that that doesn’t conflict either. So in our next step, we’ll add in a cable tray.