Optimizing Revit MEP Mechanical Tagging: A Step-by-Step Guide

Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for Revit MEP Mechanical. In the previous videos, we went ahead and got a lot of our tagging done. Hopefully you took some time.

You know, we didn't necessarily step through, walk through every single step of every single tag. So as you go through, hopefully you took some time to go ahead and finish up tagging. If you see tags that need to be adjusted, or you need to add a tag, you know, feel free to do that, pause the video, do what you need to, to go ahead and populate those tags.

I actually just realized that I did not tag any of the return ducks. So I'm just going to tag those real quickly. That's a, that's a quick, easy one to do.

There we go. And I didn't tag anything down there. We'll worry about that later.

So what I want to go ahead and do now is I'm going to go ahead and start tagging my mechanical equipment. So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to go up to tag all. And since my mechanical equipment, I want each individual one tagged, I can go ahead and they're going to be different tags per that.

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I'm also going to make sure I have, I'm going to tag all. So again, I go back up to my annotate tab, tag all. I'm going to go to my mechanical equipment tags.

I'm also going to check to make sure that I have a leader on there and let's go with a quarter of an inch. That'll be fine. I'm going to hit apply and I'm going to hit okay.

And now we kind of got to go ahead and zoom in here. So you can see, I have all these VAV tags, so we can just start adjusting these. And again, I might have some other tags that I may need to adjust as I go.

There we go. So go ahead and work through these VAV tags. Now some of the VAV tags may not necessarily be the correct item, but I don't, we can change it here.

And I'm to go ahead and do that, but I also have a little bit of a faster way to go ahead and do that. So I'm going to work through, get these VAVs all tagged up. Again, this doesn't have a leader or an arrowhead on it.

What I'd like to do is apply an arrowhead to it. It just has a line at the end here. I'm going to go ahead and add that 15 degree filled arrowhead.

So select the tag, edit type, leader arrowhead, arrow filled 15 degree, hit apply, hit okay. And there we go. We're starting to get those items on there.

There we go. Again, it's just a balancing act. You're going to have to take your time, go through and adjust these as you see fit.

So just work your way around. I don't want to necessarily line up with that line there. So VAV, VAV.

So as you're populating these, you may want to think about necessarily how they're going to be tagged. Now, the ones that are up here at the top, these were pre-tagged in the model. So they were kind of the right way.

Let's go ahead and go down here, kind of see what's And some of these tags did not get quite get cleaned up. So I'm going to have to clean those up as I go. But if I grab this over this VAV, you can see where it says AHU11.

Well, I don't want that to be AHU11. I want that to be VAV something. And I populated with that based on the fact of what we have populated when placing this.

So it's kind of one of these things, it's kind of a pain to go through and have to redo it. But there's an easy way to go ahead and do it. Now I can sit here and I can go, I can click on this tag and say, change it to VAV, VAV-22.

Now it's saying elements have duplicate mark values because there's another VAV-22 somewhere in the model. So that's kind of, it's kind of a tough way to go ahead and do that. What I'm going to end up doing is I'm actually going to create a schedule that lists all my VAVs so that then I can go ahead and adjust them and update the tags.

But what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to keep adjusting my tags here and go from there. So just keep adjusting, keep adjusting. It's a lot of adjustments to do.

Sometimes this is also kind of why I like to just use the tag by category. I could just go to every single air handling unit or excuse me, VAV, the tag is confusing me now. I could go to every VAV and then just tag it and place the tag exactly where I want it to be.

So I'm trying to find a good spot for this one. This one's kind of like in a tight little corner here that it's kind of hard to read, but that's okay. It should be okay.

If you wanted to, you could drag this away. If I really wanted to, I could say, put it there, drag it over. And that's probably a little easier to read.

So let's go ahead and create this schedule. We can always come back to the tag adjustments and we will, so that we can make sure that it's good to go. And even adjusting some of my air diffuser tags, I just can't leave it alone.

I've got to fix it. And that should be a thing that you are doing too. You should take the time, make sure your tags are fixed.

They're readable. You know, with this little guy, I'm going to move over here. This one I can delete because I've combined it with this tag, go from there, so on and so forth.

So let's go ahead and create the schedule. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a mechanical equipment schedule. So I'm going to go down here to mechanical equipment, hit okay.

Now I'm going to add in the mark. I'm going to find mark. I'm going to find family and type.

Actually, I'm going to find family. I kind of like to separate family and type, just it's helpful type. There we go.

And everything there should be good. I'm going to leave it as that. Let's go ahead and bring in type comments, just in case maybe there are some type comments that we want to go ahead and bring in.

Actually, we'll just do comments so that we do the instance version of the comments. Let's see if I can find comments here. There we go.

And I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. You can see here. Now I need to set up some sorting and some filtering because I'm going to have some other types of items here.

So I'm going to go ahead and hit filter. I'm going to filter by family equals. And I want this to be VAV unit single duct.

I just want to see my VAV units. So I'm filtering this to see just the mechanical units that are my VAV single duct. I'm going to go ahead hit OK.

And actually, let's go ahead sort. I'm going to sort it by mark. So filter, and then sort by mark itemize every instance is good hit OK.

And what you'll kind of notice is that my VAV is set to VAV 28. So remember, all of this stuff is linked together. If I change the mark here, it's going to go ahead and change it on my tag too.

So what I'm going to go ahead and do is type in VAV dash 29. And that's going to add it to this list. Same thing here.

Again, since I've filtered this, I'm only seeing my VAVs, VAV dash 30. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to do dash 31. But I'm going to highlight this text control C, come into here, control V 32, control V, and just a little bit faster rate control V 34, V 3536.

And I'm just going to keep going down the list. Apparently I have one with a I typed in two 37s. I'm going to change one to 38.

There. Control V. You just got to remember which value you're at. So I'm up to 40.

Whoops, I forgot to control V put in my VAV dash 40. VAV 41. Control V, VAV 42.

Control V, VAV 43. Almost there. What, what number did I end on a 45? So I'm at 46,49.

I accidentally put a little comma or apostrophe there. 50. And I'm just renaming this mark.

I already have a 51,52. This going through and just make sure that all these VAVs. So then I had 55,56,57, and 58.

Perfect. Now if I want to check the tags of other ones, I can call this my VAV schedule, which I am going to go ahead and do. So I'm going to go ahead and here VAV schedule.

There we go. So I have the type, the family and the mark listed with the comments. Now I want to also see maybe my air handling units.

I want to see my other items. So I could go ahead, select this guy, right click. I'm going to duplicate this.

So I'm going to duplicate the schedule. It's going to be VAV schedule copy one, but I'm going to change my filter and my filter allows me to see different types of stuff. So I'm going to go filter.

I'm going to change it. Say to family does not equal VAV. So this is going to be a mechanical equipment schedule.

I hit. Okay. And there we go.

So you can see, I have my rooftop air handling units. So I'm going to call this a mechanical equipment schedule. There we go.

So I have my heat pumps. I have my kitchen hood and I could change these tags or whatever I want to be. So I'm going to make this like EF dash one.

Okay. This is the, this is, these are the mini splits. So I'm going to call this MS-1, MS-2 for my mini splits.

We have our kitchen hood. So I'm going to call this KH-1. This exhaust vent, I'll call it EF-2.

I'm going to go ahead, make my air handling units going to be a little bit more better there. So this will be AHU-2-02, AHU-03, AHU-04. And you know, I don't remember exactly what this guy is.

So let's go take a peek at it. So one thing you can do from a schedule is I could select this and I can go highlight and model. I can go highlight and model.

It's going to take me to a view where that element is shown. So that is my makeup area unit over my kitchen hood. Right? Now I'm going to go back to my mechanical equipment schedule and I'm going to go ahead and call this my MUA-1.

And there we go. So I now have my mechanical equipment schedules cleared away. This is going to affect the marks that I have specifically with the tags.

So I'm going to go ahead and actually put both of these schedules on my item. So this is a really great example of how a schedule can affect or be used to go ahead and make our lives a little bit easier. So I'm going to go ahead and kind of get this kind of lined up.

There we go. There's my mechanical equipment schedule. I'm also going to go ahead and bring on my VAV schedule.

This one might be kind of long. We're going to go ahead and put it on this side. We can make it a little shorter though by getting it down like that.

And here we go. We'll just go ahead and drop it in right there. We've created these three different schedules.

We've also talked about how can we edit the information in these schedules. If I go back to my mechanical level one plan, you'll notice that all my tags say VAV now where they originally said AHU. And that is because I was able to edit those in the schedule in a very quick and fast way.

Remember the schedules are just a table view of your model. All right. Okay.

We went through, we've kind of gotten the tags all squared away. I'm going to stop this video here and we'll see you in the next one.