Discover how to place return terminals and adjust duct parameters within the Revit MEP course. This detailed walkthrough provides insight into the complexities of manipulating unhosted elements, aligning and copying elements, and dealing with unwieldy parameters.
Key Insights
- The process of placing return terminals involves changing the type of air terminal, a process visually indicated by a supply diffuser symbol. The terminals are then placed according to the desired layout, with the option to copy non-hosted elements to other rooms for efficiency.
- Working with ducts in the Revit MEP course requires knowledge of the system's specifics, such as the duct's dimensions and elevation. Once these parameters are established, the ducts can be placed and adjusted within the model.
- Despite the seemingly intuitive interface, Revit sometimes places elements in unexpected locations, necessitating troubleshooting. Adjustments may involve changing the element's associated level or altering its system type to ensure it corresponds to the correct color code.
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. In the previous video, we went through and talked about some duct parameters and the parameters that are part of mechanical systems and placed some air terminals. We’re going to go ahead and finish by placing some return terminals now.
So I'm going to go back up to my air terminal, I need to change the type here. You’ll notice that when I place this terminal, it had a little X across it, and that’s really a visual indicator that it's a supply diffuser. I'm going to go ahead and find my return.
Now I can use the search, and I'm just going to type in "return" to find everything that has "return." So I can find my return diffuser here—24 × 24 face, 12 × 12 connection. That's what I want.
Now what I need to go ahead and do is—you’ll notice that this one’s not showing up. And that’s because, if you recall from our discussion earlier, this is not a hosted element. So right now, if I were to place it, it’s actually being placed out of my view range.
Well, I know that the ceilings are at nine feet based on my experience with the model. So I'm going to change the elevation from level to be nine feet. Back in, and there it is.
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Notice I have the same little black lines. So what I'm going to go ahead and end up doing is I'm going to uncheck where the black arrows are directing where the airflow is going. So I'm going to uncheck here before I place.
And then what I can go ahead and do is I’m just going to place a couple here at the back of the room. So I can go ahead, I'm going to place one on this grid, and one on this grid. Now, since these are unhosted, they won’t move with the ceiling.
But I could actually copy these around. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to grab one of these, and I'm aligning from here to here. Then—and I still have Multiple turned on—
So I’ve got to click off. And then there, click off there. There we go.
And what I can go ahead and do is—actually, there are a couple different options I have here to deal with these. So I could just place them like normal. I can go ahead and place in place.
If I wanted to, I could go ahead and align—make sure I get the right edges here. Make sure you click off because I still have the Multiple there. Or what I could do is, since I have those and they’re not hosted, I can copy them to the other rooms.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go Modify. I'm going to go Copy. I'm going to select those elements, hold CTRL and select both, hit ENTER. I'm going to pick a corner.
And then we’ll take these and place them where I want to. Now notice I can get the intersection there. And I can take them around and place them as I need to.
And if I need to adjust them later on, I can go ahead and do that. I'm going to place that—there I go. Come down here to this room, I can just go into this room.
Let’s go to—there are a lot of references here. And there we go. There we go.
There we go. And I'm just going around and placing them. And there we are, I’ve placed my return diffuser.
We have a slightly different layout than up here above, but we wanted to get some practice placing our different diffusers. Now what I could do is take this, and I can’t really copy hosted ones.
If I were to try to copy this, let me just give you an idea of what happens. If I were to try to copy this, and I go over here and place one—I’m going to place it like here—it still stays linked, but the parameters can behave unpredictably.
So the hosted ones—you don’t really want to copy or mirror them, things like that. So that’s one of the reasons people may decide, hey, I don’t want to host these to a level. I'm just going to go ahead and manually change the elevation. But not hosting them allows me to go ahead and mirror, copy around, and do all those kinds of things.
We’ve placed our diffusers here. We want to go ahead and start talking about our ducts. Well, we need to go ahead and place our rooftop unit to start placing the ducts, and we can run the actual duct mains before tying them into the rooftop unit. So let's go ahead and do that.
We're going to copy and use the system as reference up here. So you can see that I have a duct that is—I want this to begin with mitered elbows and taps. So mitered elbows and taps, it's going to be a—let’s see—48 × 24.
And then the middle elevation is 11 feet 6 inches. So I'm going to go here under Systems. I'm going to go Duct. I'm going to use mitered elbow and taps. I know it’s 48 × 24.
So I'm going to go here, 48. And I'm in the Options Bar now. You can also pull down this list if you want to—you can type it in or pull down the option.
And then this elevation—this shows you all the elevations that are currently in use in the model. I'm going to use that 11 feet 6 inches, or you could type in 11 space 6 for 11 feet 6 inches. I'm going to run my main kind of—I'm going to kind of mirror this. I know I'm right over this wall—we’ll adjust it a little bit.
So it’s not in that wall. But I'm going to go ahead and run this main. So I'm just going to click to start, drag down, click there, drag over, click there.
Now it’s interesting that none of these elements are showing up. We’re going to have to investigate that a little bit to see what’s going on. None of these elements are visible.
So let’s go ahead and take a look at our 3D view. And let’s see, where is it? Ah, interesting. So for some reason, it decided to go up to the top.
Well, what I can go ahead and do—and this is one of these things that happens with Revit—is sometimes I'm going to change it to Level 1. And I'm also going to change this to Level 1. But notice it didn’t move it down.
So what I’m going to go ahead and do is I'm going to change this middle elevation to 11 feet 6 inches. And that should move the entire system down. Now you’ll notice that it’s actually the wrong color.
So I need to change the system type here. I'm going to change this to Supply Air. And that will change the entire run there.
