Importing Electrical Families from the Warehouse

Alright. So the warehouse is where we always put our source of truth for families and schedules and details and whatnot. So the idea is that you copy whatever you need into your project. We don't keep all of this stuff in the template because we want the template and the project to be as lightweight as possible. When you have all of your families in at once, especially, like, mechanical, for instance, their warehouse is ginormous.

So if they copy all of it into every single project, the project size gets really big. The idea is that if you like, let's say your scope just needs a few things, you copy just a portion of this and put it in your project. Electrical's not as big of an issue because typically it's not that crazy. Maybe lighting. Lighting, I know, can get really, really big.

So the idea is, like, you just take what you need. Let's say you need, like, all of this and maybe, you know, the rest of this here. Maybe you wanna grab your magic boxes and your grounding, but, like, you don't need all of your lights. You can take this, and then we're gonna hit the copy button over here, copy to clipboard, and then we're gonna switch over to our project. So if you're using the Rev X template, you can see that we have, I'm just going to collapse all.

Up here in the project setup, you can go to start here, and there's a view that you can use for pasting families from warehouse. So now that I'm in this view, I'm gonna hit the paste button. And then this is just warning me because I already have stuff pasted in here, so it's just I'm gonna overwrite it, which is fine for this demonstration. But you can see, like, it's starting to work in the background by importing all of the families. And then, you'll see that there's a there's, a blue box here that signifies where I'm gonna paste.

So I'm gonna click off to the side because once I paste it in, I'm gonna delete it so that it doesn't appear on the floor plan, but it stays in the model. So I just clicked, and it it shows where it's going to land, and I need to make sure I click the Finish button up here. And there we go. So now this is all on the floor plan. It's brought into the model. So what that means is I can go up here to systems, and if I click on receptacle, for instance, you'll see well, where the heck? Why is it way over here? So that's kinda strange. There we go. There was a weird error where this was appearing off screen.

So you can see that when I click on the receptacle, all of the different types and families are all brought in here. And then same thing for oops. Didn't mean to place it. Where'd go? Same thing for, like, if I were to click on lighting fixture, you can click that, and you can see I brought in all my light fixtures. So now the project is ready to go. I can just start working on it. Wowzers. Make this smaller again. Now the project is ready to go.

I can just click on my ribbon and place fixtures as I need to. So I don't actually need this on the floor plan anymore, so I'm gonna select it and hit delete so that it cleans it up. But just to confirm, we can go over here to families, and you can see if I open up, like, lighting fixtures, all of my families are in here. There seems to be some duplicate. Like, for instance, I already had some sight lights in here.

So when I pasted it again, it brought in some extras. So I'm actually gonna delete those just to clean this up. You don't really want duplicates in there with extra number ones, namely because, like, if you needed to change or fix a fixture or, you know, make some altercation to it, and your project has a mixture of, like, type one and type two, like, instance, let's go to let's find something here. So oh, man. I did this with switches. So, like, if I started putting half the building with disconnect switch and then, you know, the other half with disconnect switch one, and then I needed to fix the family. If I fix just disconnect switch without the one, then half of my disconnect switch is gonna be updated. So you generally don't wanna do that. I like to keep it clean. Oops.

Looks like one of these, I already placed it. So, again, this is not the best way to do this. There's a whole different process on how to clean this up, but this is a this is just to show you how to transfer families in here. Okay. So now that we have everything transferred in here, you're good to go. I wanted to touch on one thing, and that is back in the warehouse. You have to make sure that none of your electrical equipment have a distribution system on it. So if you click on this, just check down here under distribution system. Make sure that says none. Make sure that says none.

Same thing for panel board and anything that can provide a source. Reason is if you were to assign this, let's say you power this up in your warehouse, it may not copy out of there. So when you click and you hit copy, it'll throw an error. I mean, my case, I don't have it circuited, so it's gonna work. But, if you had it with a distribution system on here, if I click this and there was something that says, like, one twenty slash two zero eight, if you hit copy, there are times where it won't copy out.

To fix that, you essentially just got to place a clean instance of this family. So I would go up here to systems, click on electrical equipment, get a branch panel, and just, you know, I would place it next to it and get rid of the one that's been contaminated with a distribution system. So if you ever run into that problem, that's the solution to it, and then just make sure you keep your warehouse free of distribution systems. I even went as far as to delete it out of the warehouse. So if I go to my voltage or my distribution systems, you'll see that I don't have anything else besides just the one.

I I parent I can't oh, wait. Never mind. I can delete that. So, yeah, I can just delete all of that, and now I'll never have that problem. But if you happen to have distribution system in there and you can't copy it, that's why. Alright. And that's how you copy stuff out of the warehouse into your project.