BONUS: Make a Stacked ERV using the Magic RTU

So what I'm what I'm what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put another box on top of this box to represent, like, a a stacked ERV to show that you can get into more complicated geometries. And we'll we'll kinda spend the rest of our time looking at that because that one's interesting, and we'll also talk about why and when you would want to name reference planes and why that matters. So okay. The warehouse, mechanical warehouse. So just side note, this is where all the Rev X families live.

This is familiar to some of you, obviously. In this view, we've got all of our schedules. We'll load here in a second. Got all of our schedules, equipment schedules on the left, and all the equipment on the right. So here we go. And we're gonna talk obviously, we're gonna talk about schedules tomorrow. I just need to grab this. Copy this back over. Alright. So I needed I had to bring it back over because I needed the I needed all the duck connections on this.

Okay. So this is my this is my sort of OG unit, and I wanna create a ERV. I need to do a file save as. Save it as a family and call it an ERV. Okay. So now that I've done my safe as, I know, okay. This equipment, I'm not gonna have this condensing unit. I can just delete that, and it's an instance. I could bring it back if I want it, but I I don't need that. And so this let me get this lower box a little bit more oriented.

I'll see. I also don't need the hood. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make the length a bit longer. 14, the height is a bit shorter. Width, maybe, like, four as well. Alright. That'll do. We can start. So what I wanna do is I want there's so this is like an ERV where there's gonna be another oh, I can draw on the screen. So there's gonna be another box, like another box up here, and then the duct nectar is gonna be the end.

So, boy, I forget the way it's supposed to be. It's like supplier here. No. It's like outside air, supply air, return air, exhaust air, something like that. I'm gonna confuse it horribly. I know that off the top of my head, but I don't. But so that that's basically what I wanna build just using the parts that are in this in this family. Here we go. K. So the first thing I can do is I can pull my extrusion rectangular and plop it on the top. And then the width let's see. With let's get this. Make sure this is oriented correctly. It's not. There we go.

Okay. So the con width, we're gonna map that to the equipment width. Equipment width. And we're gonna go into the reference level. I can't see it Front. There we go. No. Left is what I meant to do. There we go. And then I wanna I want this align I want this to sit directly on top of the other unit, so I'm gonna use the align tool. Align there. Find that center line. Lock it. Now there we go. And then the comp thickness, that's just the height of the top box.

I'm gonna call this equip height of top. Oops. I I almost broke my own rule. Height of top box. It's gonna be type as well. And then the con height, which is the the length in this dimension, that's gonna be top box length. Okay. So then let's go let's go make this a little bit more set up. So let's see. Top box length.

Let's say on my cup sheet, that's six feet. And the top height I should have called it top box height, but I didn't. I called it equip height of top box. I would go and change that. But let's change that to let's say that's also four feet or three feet or whatever I said. Equip height. Yeah. K. Four foot's fine. Okay. So I've got that. So we wanna move these duct connectors onto different faces. Right? Like, these duct connectors belong on the ends here, here, here, and here, and they've got these dimensions applied to them. So what I had done before is I had just moved them, and that sort of broke the connections.

But then I had to because I've done it so many times and screwed myself over so many times, I knew that I had to remember to clean those broken reference lines out. But you can also do it in a more sort of preemptive way so that you don't leave something broken for you to forget about and do it first. So let me show that. Let me go into a let's go into a front view. Here's my return air connection. So I've got this dimension. So I'm gonna delete that, and then I'm also gonna go into a plan view section. My return air distance from rear, I'm gonna delete that. Then I'm gonna go to my three d view. I'm gonna select that, and I'm gonna say pick new, and it gives me that weird crosshairs.

And I click here, and it doesn't give me any errors because I haven't broken any constraints because I already removed them. So I that's actually the rec recommended way of doing it because you you're not leaving a booby trap for yourself in your future. So flip that back out. So it's pointed in the right direction. Okay. And let's let's do the same for the rest of these. So far distance. Water. Water coil. Yay. K. Let's go to the back, see if there's anything over here. It's not air. It was. Yay.

I I've got one more. Say Quip left. Right. Okay. That might have been it. Oh oh oh, wait. There we go. That's the last one. Okay. So all of all of the parameters driving my deck connections have been removed, so I can safely move them all.

So this one, I'm gonna move. For Ashley's laughing at me for not knowing, like, off the top of my head where these deck connectors go. And new. This one can go up here. Put in the right direction.

Nice. Stick up there. And then this is where I would go through, and I would I could add the parameters back and create them if they don't already exist. So this is an instance where I might need to create you know, I might need to come in here and create some parameters because they didn't necessarily exist before. So for example, this is the this is the outside air connection, and it needs a parameter to define its height above above either here or here depending on what's going on on the cut sheet.

So if I go if I go into my front view here, and it's a little hard to see because my reference my reference plane defining the top of this box is hidden. So I'm gonna tab select it, pull that out so I can work with a little easier. And then I can create a new parameter. So DI, I'm gonna click there. I'm gonna click there and pull that out.

And I'm gonna give that a new parameter, and I'm gonna call it, let's say, air distance from top of lower box. Again, sentences. I'm a big fan of descriptive sentences for parameter names, so I've got that. And then, you know, I think on this equipment, these these are all gonna be symmetric in in x and y or in y rather. So if I go to reference level, I'm going to make that symmetric.

Going to make that symmetric, and then I need to go to left. Make that symmetric. Good. So what happened here is I thought that I was selecting this reference plane, the center reference plane to align one of these duct connectors to, but I actually was selecting the center line in that nested family. And it wasn't obvious because it just kind of highlighted.

So I needed to make sure that I was selecting this as the target for for aligning this. Make sure. Just just putting a few things apart so that I've got enough space to see what I'm doing. There we go. Line that up. Line that up. It was nice of Revit to give me that that warning front, and then I can add the other parameters as needed. That was exhaust air. Distance above top of lower box. Okay.

And then I, you know, I I didn't finish, but we're coming up on time here. So I'm just gonna push this into my my model. And there we go. It's all working.