Discover how to create new views and place electrical devices and equipment in your designs using the Revit software. By following these steps, you can effectively manage your floor plans, change properties of the floor plan view, and properly adjust lighting in your plans.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on creating new views for floor plan designs in Revit, including duplicating floor plans of different levels and adjusting view templates to better suit your design needs.
- It emphasizes the importance of adjusting lighting fixtures and placing electrical equipment accurately for an effective floor plan. Various types of electrical panels and boards are mentioned as essential elements in the design process.
- A practical guide to handling dimensions, aligning and placing electrical equipment, and adjusting elevation levels in your plan is provided. The article concludes with anticipatory remarks on the inclusion of devices such as wall outlets in subsequent steps.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDC, our video course content for the BIM 321 course, Introduction to Revit MEP. In the previous videos, we went ahead and got all of our lighting dialed for the first floor and the second floor. In this next set of videos, we want to go ahead and focus on putting in devices, electrical equipment, and those specific types of things.
We want to go ahead and let's actually, we need to create some new views. We have some ceiling plan views, which are for our lighting plan, here shown in the project browser, but we want to go ahead and create some floor plan views. So I want to go ahead, let's go to our view tab please, so please click on your view tab.
I'm going to go plan views, floor plan. I'm going to go ahead and uncheck, do not duplicate existing views, because we do want to duplicate a floor plan of level one and level two. I'm going to hold control and select both of those.
By holding control, I can select or deselect whatever I need to. I'm going to go ahead and hit okay, and it's going to create those views. Now one thing you'll notice, that they are listed under the mechanical here, under our HVAC floor plans, obviously these are not the types of views that we want to, or want to have.
We need to go ahead and change our properties of the floor plan view. We need to change both the discipline and sub-discipline, but one thing you'll notice is that the discipline and the sub-discipline are both grayed out. The reason for that is because of the view template.
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I'm going to go ahead and go to mechanical plan, and I'm going to go ahead and change my view template to electrical plan, and these are templates that already come in. I'm going to go ahead and hit apply, and hit okay, and as you can see, it's now moved the discipline to electrical and the sub-discipline to power, which is exactly what we want. So I can go here, floor plans, and I have my level two.
Let's go ahead and do the same for level one, just navigate back to it here. I'm going to go ahead, change my view template from mechanical plan to electrical plan, apply, and okay, and here we are. I want to do a couple other things that we're going to do to each of these views.
I don't need to see my lighting in these plans, so I'm going to go ahead, hit VV. I'm also going to go ahead and check this here. What's happening is because we have our electrical plan view template, it's not going to allow us to adjust anything.
So I'm going to hit cancel. I'm going to go back to my view template and change it to none, apply, okay. Now it's not going to change anything that we have here, but now if I go to VV, as you can see, the items are not grayed out anymore.
I'm going to go ahead and scroll down and find lighting fixtures, apply, and okay. There we are. I'm going to go to my level two plan.
Again, the same thing. I need to change my view template from electrical plan to none, apply, okay. I'm going to go VV, and I'm going to go ahead and turn off my lighting fixtures.
Right there, apply, okay. Let's go ahead and hop back to level one. Now we have a little electrical room up here, so I want to go ahead and we're going to be placing some panels and things like that in here for our electrical equipment.
I want to go to the systems tab, and then I want to go ahead and let's go to electrical equipment here. We don't have any family loaded in right now, and it's asking us do we want to load an electrical equipment family. I'm going to hit yes.
I want to go ahead and let's find the correct site, which will be under electrical here. I'm going to go to MEP. I want to go electric power.
Let's go ahead distribution, and as you can see, we have our breakers. We have our lighting and appliance board, and a lot of other items here. We have switch boards, but we're just going to go ahead and use these single phase 120 volt MCB panel.
Also, let's go ahead. I want to bring in some of this panel here also, so the lighting and appliance panel board 208 and the single phase surface panel. I'm going to go ahead and hit open and load those in.
Now, all of these different panels, as you can see in my type selector, the lights and appliance panel board have both 100 amp, 225 amp, and 400 amp. If we need to change that, we can always go into the edit type properties and change these other items here. We could change all of the MCB rating, all the circuiting stuff, and deal with that.
For what I want to go ahead and do is let's go ahead and take for the single phase panel, I want to go ahead and take a 225 amp. We need to go ahead and place it on the wall, as you can see. I'm going to go ahead, hover in here.
I want to place one, two, three, and that's all it is. They do have an elevation, and right now they're at four feet, and we're going to cut a section and take a look at it here in a second. I'm going to go ahead and hit escape.
I'm going to hit my thin lines just in case it isn't on. Just again, the thin lines makes it a little bit easier to work with. I also want to go ahead and place some lighting boards over here.
I'm going to go electrical equipment. I'm going to choose my lighting and appliance board, 225 amp, and I'm also going to put three of those. One, two, three.
There it is. I'm going to go ahead and hit escape. I want to go ahead and align these so that they're even, so I'm going to go DI for the dimension.
I'm going to go ahead and go from the center line to the center line to the center line, and then EQ. Turn off my EQ and then delete the dimension. I'm going to go DI again for dimension.
Go from here to here to here, EQ, and I'm actually going to go ahead and leave those constraints there. So I'm going to go ahead, DI, and I want to do the same again here. I'm going to go ahead and leave those constraints there for right now because what I'm going to do is I'm going to create another dimension from the edge of the wall here to the edge of the panel.
I'm going to create a dimension from the edge of the wall here to the edge of the panel, and I'm going to go ahead and select these, and I'm going to change this dimension to, say, one foot, and it's going to maintain that equality constraint there. Select the panel here. I'm going to go ahead and change this to one foot, and it's going to maintain the equality constraint there.
Everything is good. I'm going to go ahead and hit escape, delete this guy, delete this guy, and there we go. I'm going to go ahead and delete both of these and also unconstrain.
The last thing I want to go ahead and do is I can see that they're kind of not lining up exactly. I'm just going to align. I'm going to choose a center line here, align that there, choose a center line here, align that there, and we've placed in our electrical equipment.
If there's any other equipment that we need to place in there, we potentially could, but for what we're doing here, this will be just fine. I'm going to go ahead, and now let's cut a section and take a look at these. I'm going to go here to my section view, take it, I'm going to drag over, and just cut a small section there.
Perfect. I'm going to go ahead and double click here, and as you can see, here are our panels. I'm going to go ahead and go window tile, and as you can see, I have quite a few views open, so I'm actually going to go ahead and expand out that floor plan, close my hidden windows, and then come back to here, and now do my window tile.
There we go. Let's see what height these guys are at. I'm going to do DI for dimension.
I'm going to go from here to here. Even though the 4-foot dimension, which is our elevation, is the correct elevation here is where it is, but it's not measuring directly from that. It would be measuring from that line there, or the center line.
I'm going to go ahead and actually have the top of all these at 6 feet. I'm going to change all of the elevations for these to 4'2". I'm going to move up just a little bit.
I'm going to go ahead and select them over here in the plan, and let's actually flip that section by using here, and as you can see, these are even lower. If I go dimension here to here, and that's kind of the weird thing about this electrical equipment is is the fact that these ones are listed that the top, they're measured from the top, where the ones on the other side, the lighting and panel boards are measured from the middle of them. That's just how they are set up in the family.
I'm going to go ahead and select these and change those to 6 feet, and there we go. I want to go ahead. I'm going to go ahead and zoom extents on both views.
Go ahead and Control-S, save the file, and we've placed our electrical equipment. I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here, and then when we come back, we'll go through and place some devices like some wall outlets, those kind of items, and I'll see you in the next video.
