Working with Wires in Revit

Alright. So I'm gonna talk about all these wires. So wires have a lot of little features that you can tweak or adjust. And let me just explain to you the behavior of electrical wires. So there's a couple small components here.

This little cross, you know, crosshair, this is the actual electrical connection point. So if you were to click this and, like, drag it outside of the fixture, you can see that it disconnects it, and you lose like a lot of the tags and wire marks and everything. So if you were to drag it back in here and you see how it like it snaps to a square connector, that's when it attaches itself to the fixture. So once it attaches itself to the fixture, it now can read all these properties. So again, if I were to grab this and I disconnect it, you see how none of the electrical information is pertinent to this wire anymore.

But when I go ahead and reconnect it, it all calculates out. So that's the first thing. If you want to disconnect anything from a fixture, you grab that. Now then there's just also the little circle here. This little circle here is a graphical adjustment.

So when you click this and I move it around, you can see how the properties of the electrical system still maintains itself in the wire, but I can actually graphically change this to wherever I want. So maybe I wanna keep it here, or maybe I wanna snap it to some other part of the fixture. So this is the graphical part of it. Then if you zoom in even further, you see this tiny little dot right here. You can actually click that and move it around to change the location of where the tick mark happens. Let's say let's say it's a little close. Like, let's say you have a lot of text here, you just wanna move it out here. That is adjustable as well. Right? And you can also adjust to have more tick marks or less tick marks.

Let's say you wanna throw in extra wires. This is easy plus or minus. Let's say you actually don't want the tick marks at all. This is something you can adjust in your system settings. So up here under MEP settings, you would go to electrical settings, and then under wiring, you can actually dictate all of your tick marks if you want them to show on home runs, always, never, just a home runs or end of home runs.

So you if you wanna turn it all off, you can just check never. And then while you're in here, you can do slant marks across tick marks. You can choose to show the neutral ground or hot independently if you don't want to, or you can have different lengths. So you can if you want your ground to be shorter than the rest, then that's possible here too. The other setting that you might find useful here is the gap of wire crossing.

So right now, it's set at one and one thirty second, and what this adjusts is where the two wires cross. So it'll automatically put a gap in there. If you want this gap to be larger, let's say you wanna be able to see it like a larger gap up here, then you would go in here, and maybe you can adjust that to maybe two thirty seconds. Okay. And you see how the gap now gets bigger. Alright. Now back to this home run here. This home run was drawn in with just two points so that it's a straight line. So if I move this around, you can see how it doesn't bend. Let's say you wanted to do, like, an arc home run.

You can actually right click on this wire, and up here, you there's insert vertex. So you can choose to insert the vertex, let's say, right here. And then now I can actually go ahead and drag this around. Oh, this this was originally attached. This is just a wire tag.

So before, it it was like hanging just off screen. Anyways, so with the addition of another vertex, you can choose to bend this wire any way you want. You can see how the way I move this, it affects the curvature of this wire, and you can actually add more than one. Let's say I can right click on this again, and I can insert another vertex right here, and I can start, you know, doing some fancy squiggles if I wanted to. Alright?

And conversely, if you wanted to delete a vertex, you can hit delete as well, and then that that goes away. Here, let me show you again. So it to insert, you it'll ask you where you see this little blue dot that's running around? It'll ask where you wanna insert it. So I'm gonna click here. Now inserts it, and then when I delete it, I can right click on it, hit delete, and it's gone. K? Alright. So then lastly, this is the tail end of the home run. Now if I were to take this home run and drag it to another fixture that is on a different circuit, like here, I'll tag this.

So tag this wire. I'm gonna go to annotate, tag by category, and then gonna click here. I'm gonna drag this to the end. So you can see how this is circuited to panel l s one circuit two. And over here, this is l p one circuit three. So this is a life safety circuit, and this is a normal panel circuit. Now if you were to grab this wire and attach it to a different circuit, you can see how the home run starts to have double home run arrows. And then this it it starts to get very screwy. Like, this will have an extra home run-in here. You might run into the issue of having multiple circuits on each one.

So if I click on this, you can see how it's LP one circuits two and three, but that makes no sense because it's from different panels. So it presents all kinds of issues. Don't cross wires between circuits. So to fix this, just take this, drag it back out, and you can see how that fixes it. Alright?

So just pay attention when you're circuiting that you don't accidentally land a wire from one circuit to another because it'll start causing all kinds of double arrows. And if you use check marks or if you use tick marks, it's gonna have all kinds of tick marks. Alright? So that is the lowdown on wires. Another one of these tidbit that everyone might like to know is that you can draw different style wires.

You don't have to draw the arc. So if I wanted to draw a chamfered wire, I can go up here to systems under wire. You see how there's arc, spline, and chamfered. So like, let's just take a chamfered wire, for instance. Click here, come out to here, and down to this other fixture, and then over.

And you can see how it I'm gonna move this just to make this a little cleaner. So you can see how it does right angle runs with a 45 degree chamfer. And this is just a different style. You can obviously change this, you know, if I wanted to go off tilt for some reason, that's fine. But if you were to just drag this to perpendicular, it tends to snap to perpendicular, and then it'll add in the 45 degree chamfers.

Conversely, there's also spline. So spline is it's very flexible, and so you can add every click that I'm putting here adds an extra vertex. And then if I were to click on it again, you can see all these little dots here. This is all the vertices that I choose to add, so you can you can really start getting fancy with this if you wanted to. But I generally don't use this unless you're, I don't know, specifically trying to illustrate a certain curvature or something. But these are the two styles I generally see, arc wire or chamfered wires. Alright. And that should be enough to get you started with using wires inside of Revit.