Add Duct Connectors

Okay. So let's go into edit family, and we're gonna look at these. And so to create the duct connectors, we just go create duct connector, and you mouse over the plane you want, which is that one. Let's do the same for here. And then the so this duct connector is gonna center itself on this face. So it'll take care of its own location, but we need to set the dimensions here. So either in the properties window or over here, you can set the width just by clicking a little plus sign right here. So this is RA width. RA width. And this one is RA height.

Height. And this one is SA height. This one is SA width. Okay. So we got those. We are we are definitely not done. So there's all these settings. And the question is is how do you know what to set these guys? I mean, the system classification is obvious. We've decided that one's return air, and this one is supplier. So that's easy enough. You can kinda guess that the flow direction. So this is return air. Air is coming back in, so the flow direction needs to be in. Alright. That makes sense. And supplier, it's coming out. It's being distributed. So flow direction is out. Flow configuration, calculated preset system.

What does that mean? And that's that's where I that's where this PDF that I included in the download link is the bible of duct pipe and electrical connectors in Revit. It was written in 2008. It's still what I refer to if I ever forget exactly what I need to do if I'm working through a tricky connector design issue. So if we look here, so what we've got is we've got an air terminal, and we've got, you know, a terminal unit like a VAV box, something like that, and we've got, like, an RTU or an AHU.

Right? And so at the air terminal, you're setting that's where you type in 400 CFM, 200 CFM, whatever. And that information gets distributed and added up through the ductwork, and it gets passed to this duct connector. That information gets passed to this duct connector, which feeds into the ductwork, which gets added up with all the other ones, and then that information gets passed to this duct connector. And I forgot the name. The author of this paper, Martin Schmidt, created a table and a discussion of what the settings want to be. So here, d one, that's the air terminal. The flow configuration wants to be preset. That kinda makes sense. You're setting it.

You're presetting what the flow is. And then here, t one, this is the terminal that's this one wants to be set to calculate it. So think that it's it's calculating the flow that all of the ductwork is aggregating and sending to it. So basically receiving the information. Now t two, that's set to preset.

And that's interesting because what's happening here is that you will tell t two that it is equal to t one, like the flow. So you so t one takes in let's say that there's a bunch of air terminals, and they all add up to a thousand CFM. T o t one will calculate, a thousand CFM. Then it will send a thousand CFM to t two, which is preset, and it will pass that into the duct system layout, which all goes and goes to u one, which again is calculated because it's just calculating all the flows that are adding up in there. And so from this, we can say we can see that we want this we want our RTU, turn airflow, to be set to calculated.

Both of them, we want them to be set to calculated. If you ever get confused, just go study that PDF. Both of these are gonna be set to calculated, which is what we want. And then we do need to create a parameter for the flow. So this is going to be our flow.

You get an instance parameter, and this is gonna be supplier flow. And, also, add a connector description. This is can be quite useful when you need it. So this is just supplysuppliercomm, and this is gonna be our account. Alright. Let's let's toss this into our project and see how we're doing. K. So now we've got now we've got the now we've got the ability to draw. Awesome. Duck.

Let's test this out. Draw duct. Let's drop it down. Shot came down a little bit more. It's not gonna let me do that. Woah. It did. Draw that. Expecting that to break. This one. That is five. Fly. Cool. It's been saying minus five inches or something. I was expecting that to go further.

Yeah. Like that. That's what I wanted. Cool. Okay. So that's working, and I could also flex this a little bit more. You know, I could say, let's say, distance from right. Let's say that's only two feet. Scoot that over like that, and that'll updates, and that is working. K.

Nice. So we've just we've just gone from a magic box. We've created a duct connector extrusion family nested in, added it, mapped to the parameters so we can control the size of each of these duct connectors, added parameters so that we can locate them anywhere in space, and we've added duct connectors so we can, I mean, connect ducts up to this? And we've we've scratched the surface of understanding the duct connector settings so that we could set them appropriately for any kind of equipment.