Launchpad Session 01 - Mechanical

Right. We're recording. So we went really fast in the first session, and we mostly talked about airside stuff. So in this session, I want to talk about, I wanna talk about hydraulics. So, so we've got an airside, you know, split system system over here.

Let's talk about putting in some hydraulic things over here for a building like this, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So we're just gonna kinda do some contrived stuff. Let's grab first, let's talk about some of the differences between hydronic systems and airside systems, because we're we're gonna look at flow and sizing and how things are connected. So just as a recap, I'm gonna grab this air terminal, and I'm going to draw a bit of duct. I'll draw this bit of duct here, and I'll just connect it with a bit of flex duct.

Move it out a bit. Okay. And and this air terminal, I can set the flow to you know, I'm I'm gonna make this smaller, so a 100 CFM. And then I could tab this I could tab this bit, and I could say duct pipe sizing, and it's gonna size it. Note that I I didn't necessarily need to like, sizing works even if one end of it isn't plugged into anything. So, like, in this case, when we sized this in the last session, it was plugged into the equipment, but it didn't really need to be. Actually, I could have if you have one open end, Revit's okay with that. As long as you're you're sending Airflow information into it, it'll do the sizing for you. So that can be and then creating round connectors. Okay.

Cool. We'll talk about that. Like, to families and connecting round connectors to families. Right? So this is also a a quick and simple way you can just this is you can almost use this as a ductulator. Sometimes I do this in Revit. I'll just pop in an air terminal, connect it via FlexDoc to a bit of duct, size it, and say, okay. That's a good size. So I don't know where my ductulator went, but I don't have it at my desk anymore. Okay. So fairly, straightforward. Okay. Great. Yeah. We will we'll talk about that.

So let's go let's bring in a bit of equipment. Let's bring in a VAV box, and we're gonna throw it in here. And we're we're just gonna mess around with it real quick to get a sense for how Revit thinks about hydronic systems. I'm gonna bring this off of the ground a little bit. I'm bring it up to eight.

And I'm going to right click, draw a pipe, and it's gonna ask me which one because the two coil connectors are right above each other. So I need to go right hand top supply in, flow direction in. So that's gonna be my supply. And I can just go like that. And if I select my unit and I change the flow, here it is, coil flow.

Let's change it to seven. And I click this pipe, it shows that there's no flow. And that's because with Hydronics, Hydronics are closed loops. Revit wants to see that loop. So if I click on this and I right click and I say draw pipe, and it's it it already it knows which one I'm gonna do because the other one's occupied. And I click out here and I put it. Now if I select, this bit of equipment, it's showing the flow because I've completed that loop. Revit is happy. It says this is a legitimate, hydronic system, so it's it's cool with that. So that's something to keep in mind.

Once you've done that, once you've got flow in a pipe, you can size it. So I'm just gonna tab select both of these. I'm gonna say duct pipe sizing. I'm gonna go friction two and a half feet. Let's say, okay. And these sized up to inch and a quarter, which maybe is not exactly what you want, but you could restrict that. Okay. So that's very simple. That's kind of understanding one of the first lessons in how Revit thinks about hydronics. Let me get those off.

So now I'm going to do a quick hydronic layout system. So I've got my VAV box over here. For this system, I'm going to put in a boiler and a pump in here. I'm gonna start encroaching on Ryan's Ryan's space, and we want to run a main from here. And then we wanna go up to the roof, and we wanna supply this, what's now going to become a hydronic, a four pipe, a two on the roof instead of a, refrigerant, RTU.

And so we're gonna go up there. So let's go back to the warehouse, and I'm going to grab a boiler and drop it in here. Okay. There. I think these clearances aren't very realistic, but we'll keep that there for now.

This room isn't really big enough for all this stuff we're putting in it. Alright. So I've got a little circulator pump, and that's and I've got my RT up on the roof. So we've got we have we have our equipment, and I always I always start with that. Now I'm gonna give a quick spiel about appropriate modeling over modeling.

Many people who are new to Revit, they think that because you can connect everything to all the pipes you should. That isn't necessarily the case, particularly based on what phase of the project you're in. So if you're if you're in SDs, if you're in DDs, coming in here and connecting all of the pipe to everything and to the oh, I also wanted to grab grab an airs expansion tank. Just get a little bit more equipment in here. Like, getting everything piped, even even if you're fast, it's gonna be a little fussy.

It's gonna take some time to do that. And if you're early in design, things might change around, might make different equipment decisions. Room might change. The dimensions might change. So don't overmodel too quickly. You can still leverage a lot of Revit's intelligence flows sizing without having to connect everything. So I'm gonna demonstrate that. I'm gonna start drawing some pipe, and I just I like to start in upper left and go, clockwise. So I'm gonna guess it wants to be two inches. I'm gonna set the elevation to 10 feet.

I'm gonna come over here to pipe types. NP standard, we'll talk a little bit more about the pipe types later. Middle middle elevation is already set, and I am going to now set my system type to heating hot water supply. And when I'm starting fresh new piping, I do typically start in a plan view, but I wanna have my three d view open. So I'm gonna start here, and I'm just gonna go over here.

And then I'm gonna pop up, and I'm just I'm purely guessing. And I I can't see it because it's up above the view plan, but I can see it in my three d view over here. And then I can I can do something like this? Cool. So I've got my now I've got my model.

And I want to check to make sure that I'm not running into anything, right, three d coordination. So I'm gonna flip on my architecture, and I'm gonna push this in to where we're at. Yeah. We're up in this up there, probably below structural. Come up. We're a bit high here, and we're we're going right through our we're going right through our RTU. So I don't like that. Yeah. I think I'm just gonna guess. Yeah. 22, that looks better. And then I can move that over there. Alright. That's close enough for now. Okay.

And, again, here, you know, assuming I'm at, like, a medium or earlier set of design, I am going to I'm just gonna stub it out in here and details, diagrams, whatever else. That's fine for here. I'm not gonna pipe it up. Now maybe it's appropriate for me to do it at a later stage of design. That's fine. Okay. So I've, I'm I'm good with this routing with respect to the architecture. I'm gonna flip that back off. And, of course, that's the supply I'd like the return. And so, of course, I could, you know, model it over and again, but Revit has this cool tool called parallel pipes.

So I'm going to go to the systems tab, and here it is, parallel pipes. So if I hover over any bit of pipe, you can see it's gonna show me that dotted line. So if I just click, it's gonna make that parallel bit of pipe. And a control z that. Up here, I could I could set however many I wanted and what the offsets are.

So that's quite useful. For this, I think six inches is probably alright. And I'm gonna hit tab once, and it's going to select that whole run, and it's gonna give me a parallel, bit of pipe. Now when you, when you do when you're going up and over and around, sometimes it's not gonna do exactly what you want, so you've got some nudging to do. But I'm also gonna select this, and this wants to be the heating hot water return.

Okay. So here here's another trick. I can just go over to my plan view, activate my plan view. Even I can't even though I can't see anything, and I'm using the down arrow, to move it. I'm keeping an eye on it here. So that looks alright. And set the middle elevation to 22, and then we perfectly overlapped it here. So I'm just carefully selecting that bit and not, you know, not the long one. So here, I can go. And you do have to be a little careful when you're moving things with the arrow in three d or even grabbing them.

If you're off a little bit, Revit might guess that you're trying to, move it up or down. And so you you'll notice that the middle elevation changed to twenty two and one and one twenty eighth. Keep an eye on that because I want those I want that to be a nice even number and for it not to give me any problems. Okay. So that looks that looks alright. Let us now, try to connect this. And so I'm going to do it the wrong way first. I'm gonna do I'm gonna have it do an error first. So if I do connect into you probably already saw this with Ryan. So hit okay.

That's my supply. Click that. It's gonna come over to the end because it has that end and which isn't what I want, so I'm gonna control z that. I could one thing I could do is I could just cap these open ends. And now, you know, let's see if this will work. Connect into our top supply in, flow direction in. That one. Okay. So that works. And then I can do the same for return.

And now, yeah, that looks good. So now that I've got that, I don't need these caps anymore. I can delete them. And let's check our sizing. So if we click on this, this has seven GPM. If we click on this, this has 4.45. That's strange. Why is why is it odd? This one's 4.429. So we're getting some weird numbers. Why is that? Well, the reason is because the very end of our hydraulic pipe system, these are open. And so we've got an open bit here. We've got an open bit here. Revit doesn't really know where the flow is going, so it makes some whack a doodle guess.

So I'm gonna cap the ends of this. And now if we check the flows, it should be seven. And on this side, it should be zero because there's nothing going in that direction because there's a cap. So Revit, when you've got one open end and flow coming in somewhere, Revit will say, okay. It's going towards the open end, I guess. So we can use that, that that way that Revit thinks about things. Okay. So, we can also come up here to the, so we can connect this guy. Same. Connect into, and hot water supply, flow direction in.

Let's do that. And, also notice here let me go back, actually. I wanna show connect into, as I cycle if I picked a different one of these, you notice the little, arrow that's showing which one it is. So that's a nice way to see what you're actually doing. So hot water supply. Connect this guy, and let's connect hot water return. I need to add the label properly. I've missed the label in this family, so I will add that. But by process of deduction, that's the hot water return. Okay.

So we've added that. You'll notice that we've got pipes going through each other, which, isn't exactly correct. So, you know, two things we could do here, from a from a design perspective, if we thought it was worth swapping these around so that the routing came around, so that the hot water was on this side, you can do that. You could we could also just have it break off and go around. Like, there's a number of different ways that we could, that we could kind of approach this.

And for this one, I think I'm just gonna go like this and then this. And I'm just gonna point out that early design, this is a waste of time. Like, doing what I'm doing right now, it's kind of a waste of time because, you know, I might be wrong about where this is, where the pipe connectors are. Maybe they're offset, so it's completely fine. I just don't like showing pipes going through pipes in my in my model. So I might just make that quick adjustment there. Oh, get that right. Yeah. Okay. So we've got that connected now.

These are still those are capped. Let's add the flow here. So in this family, we've got a parameter under the mechanical for hot water coil flows. Let's, I don't know. Let's put that to 15. And let's, you know, spot check our flow. Fifteen fifteen should be zero on this end. Right? And if we come over here to this side of the hot water coil, we should have 22, and we do. So our flows are going well. And we can now let me make this a little smaller. And we could now, size this. So oh, don't need to size everything. Alright. Let's do that.

And let's do that. And size it. Two and a half is alright. It's giving me a little warning. It says sizing failed flow for section is zero, and it's hard to see, but it it was highlighting the bit it's talking about. If I cycle to the other one, that's it's just saying like, hey. There's no flow when it's zero. It's helpful that it just doesn't try to size it because I don't wanna know what Revit would do to try to size a pipe for zero flow. Probably break the universe or something. But everything else is looks to be sized well.

Oh, that's interesting then. These two pipes are different. Maybe that's pretty peculiar that these are different. Let's double check that. Give it a give it another shot. Match connector size possibly? Possibly. But, I mean, I had the whole thing. Also, the Reynolds number is different between the two. Oh, well, the the the sizes are different now.

Just I think it's the match connect is the connector a different size on that yellow one? No. And it should be driven by the same parameter. Is there a way you can verify the size of the connector? There is a way. So if we look at these two, we we'll just check what the diameter for that is, hot water coil diameter, and this one is driven by, hot water coil diameter. So they're being driven by the same parameter. So the connector side should be the same. Gotcha. Yeah.

That's yeah. Fifteen fifth the the flow is exactly the same, so it's not reading a different flow size. Let's see. Is it close? Let's see. Is it close, to to the point six two two point four? Yeah. I'm not really sure about that one. That is interesting. I'll have to take a look at that.

Two two it's going to it's going to see if I did this. I keep pushing the wrong button. Exizing. Yeah. It's strange why it's doing that.

Let's see. I'm I'm planning on doing this anyway. Let's see if jiggling it a little bit helps. I have I will say that I often I have often not used pipe sizing and flows on complicated systems because they can it can get pretty burly to keep everything well connected. But on smaller systems, it should be easy. Like, that connected. So now this should be even more flow. We're at twenty nine twenty nine. That makes sense. Also wonder if it's if it's just confused about that, that bit at the end there.

So let's do that. Yeah. Yeah. The only I could I could see maybe if you, yeah, delete those and make them elbows. Let's see if that works. Very strange. Yeah. Well, have to check that out. See what the deal is with that. Lesson number one in Revit. Don't trust Revit. Always have a backup plan. Okay. So that that is the basic idea there. Oh, wait.

There's one more thing I wanna try. Do those. Let's say DugPipe sizing, and let's go with like, let's change this to two. It worked. It yeah. And now it's doing it. So, yeah, I mean, this is why you check when robots do stuff for you, because they can't always be trusted, particularly with twenty five year old code. So that is right. So that's the basic gist of that. Let's see.

There's a couple other things that kept open end. So let's talk about the pipe, the pipe types a little bit. So you'll notice that I chose m p dash standard, and then there's Ryan's stuff. It's called m p because you also use this for the domestic, the cold water. This is because for a lot, if not most, of design engineers, you don't need to be getting into, pipe types representing, like, precisely what it is.

This is copper. This is PEX. This is, you know, whatever. Obviously, it's important for drainage and vent because that's such different, piping that you need it to look, appropriate. So for MP Standard, what it is, if we click edit, if we go into routing preferences, this is showing us what, what it what it thinks it is. So we've we've made this very basic. It it thinks it's copper. It's got these generic elbows, tees, and things. Partly, this is because it's easier to model with the more generic, routing preferences than if you've got specialty fittings because those tend to be fussier. But this also impacts, like, the sizing.

So, the sizing criteria where when you're sizing things, when it says, you know, what the what the velocity is, all that sort of thing, it's looking at, primarily the pipe segments, and it's saying, okay. This is copper. K. The ID is this. The o doesn't hear about the OD, but the ID is this. You know? The configuration is that. So if so that's something to bear in mind when you're doing sizing. It's, using if you're just using the standard, you're getting a sort of ballpark information about what it is. And if you need more precise, information and analysis of what it is, then you need to set up, new pipe, types that are using more accurate to what you're trying to do, pipe segments.

Okay. And, something that we could also maybe talk about in the in session number two, because I think it's a little bit more germane to that, is, Revit is you can set up Revit schedules quite handily to do, like, system volume, calculations for expansion tanks and things of that nature. But, again, you know, if you're using a radically different ID for your pipes than what you're modeling, it'll be off by a bit. So you just need to understand where the information is coming from and how accurate it is. Okay.

Couple yeah. So I mentioned tags in, in Ryan's session, with analysis tags. So I'm gonna hit the tag button, and we're just gonna do free end. Gonna give me a tag I don't want, but that's alright. So I'm gonna click this tag, and we have a few different options, in here.

I'm gonna go up to my pipe analysis tag. And so I can hit this one that says flow. And so this is gonna show me, you know, what it is to ensure that, and it's gonna report the flows for me. So I'm I'm in my working plan, not my sheet view plan. So one of the reasons we have working views is so that we can row whatever we want onto this view from a design perspective to help us, and we don't need to worry about it going off to the client in a PDF set. So I can use this. We've got another one. So bottom elevation, that can just be helpful for quickly reading things, coordination sets, that sort of stuff. And there's there's a lot you can do. Let's see.

Yeah. Velocity. So let's, so if I click on if I click on a bit of pipe, now I've got all these flow parameters. Pretty much all these parameters in here, I can add to the tag. So if I go into this family and I edit it, there's a lot going on because how having multiple types work is you have multiple labels, and you and you just use a visibility parameter to toggle which one is is displaying.

But so for example, this is the one that I was just looking at for the elevation. If I wanted to, if I was interested in a tag with some other bit of information, I could select this, say edit. And I in this list is all of the parameters that are available to me that I could throw in there. So, you know, there's fixture units. There's flow state, turbulent laminar, inside diameter, insulation thickness, lots of different things that I could add in there depending on, you know, what's relevant to my to my project.

So we're gonna close that. We didn't actually wanna make any changes. Okay. So that's pipe tags. Another thing that can be useful, is insulation. I would only recommend showing it on on the drawings if your if your practice or the project is, you know, very tightly coordinated. You need to make sure things are spaced well and that they don't miss the insulation. But you can just add installation with a button. You pick the thickness. You could you choose different ones.

You can add a type and do that, and it will add installation to it. It does get kind of annoying because, like, I'm mousing over this and see nothing is like, I'm clicking and nothing is happening. So I have to kinda get in there and get right on it. So it turns fussy. So if possible, I like not adding if I need to add insulation, I like to not add insulation till the end, or I can I can add it?

And then in my working view, I can turn pipe insulation off so that I can easily select it. It's still there. And then when I'm done doing my work, I can turn it back on to make sure, that all the installation is still there. Because if you're working, sometimes it'll there'll be sections with it off, so you need to check that. Okay. Yeah. Talked about the pipe type. Okay. So we're now gonna get into a little bit of, family editing, and this is where, Mike, we're gonna talk about those, round connectors, that should address your question. So I've got this RTU family.

In last session, I just grabbed it out of the warehouse. So in the warehouse, this is this unit right here under air handling equipment. This is the great Swiss watch of mechanical equipment. And in that session, I was going fast. I just copied and pasted into my projects, and I used it as is.

I turned on the condensing unit. That's all I did. But now let's say we're we're ready to actually, you know, use this use this family, and we wanna conform it to a cut sheet that we've got. So what I would do is I would go edit family, and I'm gonna do a save as, and I'm gonna call it, r t u, four pipe hydro, launch one, such two. Okay.

So so what's going on? There is a lot going on in this. It can be kind of overwhelming the first time you you look at it, even if you are already familiar with the, with the family editor, but it can do a lot. So once you get kind of oriented to what you can do with this, you can kinda make anything with it. So this condensing unit, don't need that. I'm just gonna delete it. And then you can see I've got a few different duct connectors. I've got my return, and supply. The outside air hood, it's just a object. There's no connector on it.

I do want it in this instance. These are for, like, outside air and exhaust air. So it'd be pretty easy to make, an ERV type of object if I wanted, but don't need that for this one, so I'm gonna delete them. And then over here, I've got my chilled water, piping connections, and this is my condensate drain, and this is my gas connection, which I don't need, in this one. Okay.

So, Mike, your question was, yeah, adding adding and creating round connectors. So in this family, this is the magic of nested nested face based and face hosted, objects. So, really, all this family is is it's a box. I made this box. It's an extrusion.

And then the duct connectors, the pipe connectors, these are nested families. So if you look over here in the project browser, you can see extrusion cylinder and extrusion rectangle, and that's what these are. So if I click and drag extrusion cylinder into here, this is a face based family, and I could stick it on any surface because it it place on face is up here. Typically, use this as place on face, not place on a work plane. But so I could put this anywhere.

Put it up here. And then now I could set parameters to the diameter of this. So I could say, okay. That's chilled water coil diameter. This is a very avant garde unit. I typically don't set a parameter to the length for these things. I just set them something reasonable in the family so that they're not distracting, but you can still see them. Who needs to control that? If you need to, you can. You can just add a parameter. You click this button here. You say add a new parameter, you know, chilled water coil connection links, if that's important. So so I've created this, and now let's say that I want to, I called it chilled water. Right? Yeah.

Chilled water coil diameter. And then well, let's let's add another one. So I've got another connector there, and this is gonna be also chilled water coil diameter. So they're the right size. And then I wanna add my connectors to it, pipe connectors. So create pipe connector, and I'm going to click there and there. And it places them. Gonna control select both of them. The diameter, I'm going to set also equal to chilled water coil diameter. And then let's say I want this one to be chilled water supply.

So this is just a label. This is for humans to read. It doesn't, you know, do anything informationally. Water supply return, rather. And then so for this one, I want the flow configuration to be preset. So that's like the coil flow. Flow direction is in. Lost method not defined. Don't trust Revit to do any, pressure, like, pressure calcs, for this. At least I don't currently, so I don't even mess with that.

System classification, hydraulic supply. That's what I want. And then we need to set the flow to chilled water coil flow. And if you're creating a new family, you just create a new parameter called chilled water coil flow, with this button here. So oh, I need to select it. Okay. And then here, calculated, change it to preset, and it's returned. So it's coming back out. This is hydronic return. Flow is chilled water coil flow, and that is good.

So now those are set. And, Mike, just to make sure that I'm completely answering your question, If if I wanted to round duct connector, let's just make this connection diameter like it's pretty much the same thing. Create duct connector. Place it. It defaults to rectangle. Just change it to round or round. And then I could set the default the diameter to a parameter if I needed it. Alright. Let me know if you have further questions about that. Okay.

So we've got this box. We've deleted the stuff we don't need. Now we need to get the dimensions correct, and we need to get the, we need to get things configured. At this point, we can push this back into the family, and we can do our, edits there, to the to the, to the unit. But I wanna show you where they're coming from.

So still in the family editor, if I go to floor plans, reference level, turn thick line on, make it a little easier for you to see. So the green lines are reference planes. They're what we attach dimensions to. And then the geometry that we create, we associate the geometry to the reference planes. Won't get into that fully right now.

I think we're gonna talk about that more in the bonus session in two weeks. But the point is is that, you with with any family, you should be able to open it up and start to see what's going on by looking at the, names of the parameters. So for example, this is my return air duct connection, and we can see that we've got a parameter, dimension here called, return air distance from rear. This is the rear. This is the front. This is the left. This is the right. And if we went into a front, view, we can say this is return air distance from left. So that's what's locating the return air connector in space in the family. And we can go on through here.

So hot water coil distance from left, these connectors are associated from the left end of the unit. And then we have hot water supply distance from bottom, hot water return distance from bottom. Trying to be pretty descriptive in my parameters so that both I and other people can read them and get a at least a good sense of what they are. Sometimes you open manufacturer families, and it's like parameter one, param two, param three, dim 3.4, and it's very difficult very difficult to work with. So you can investigate if there's any confusion, you can investigate what's going on here.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna load this into the project, into my LaunchPadge. Don't need to do that. Okay. So so I'm gonna paste it there in in in space. It's probably wrong. Now it's in. I'm gonna delete it, and I'm gonna swap out this for the one that I made this one. And it gives me some, it gives me some, some issues. Connecting network. Sometimes you'll have to redo something.

Sometimes you won't. This is why I recommend like, the proper way to do this would have been instead of swapping in the bogus one, or the one before I edit it, I should have done an edit to it, placed it in, and it would have been alright. But sometimes you you you will want to swap out an existing family for a totally different one. It will give you it will likely give you some, warnings, and errors. These, and it'll force you to do some things. So I'm gonna I'm gonna hit this disconnect, and then I'm gonna investigate and make sure everything's still okay. So like, if I tab that, it looks like it's still connected. I tab that. It looks like it's still connected. The proof is is more in moving.

I move this. Is everything gonna move along with it? And everything is still, like, physically connected, so I actually think I'm probably alright. The location of these of all these connectors didn't actually move because I haven't started editing those yet. Speaking of, let's start editing it. So I'm gonna select this and say edit type. And you wanna come to the dimensions, and this is where we can start making changes to the geometry of this. So equip, width, height, length. These are the overall box size. So equipment width, let's make that, 4.5 feet.

And I can hit apply. And you can see that it got smaller. Equip height. Let's make that five feet. You don't have to hit apply after every time. I'm just trying to show you, you know, the updates that are happening. And the length, we could make this, like, 12 feet, something like that. Let's see if that those things so you noticed that that moved the it it it moves some some of the connectors here. And then, you know, I've got my imaginary cut sheet in front of me, and I'm just going down and conforming things. So let's say the return air connection height. Let's say that's actually 14 inches. So that's gonna change that. Return air connection width. Let's say that's fine. I I can change where this is.

So return our distance from left. Let's say it's actually a bit tighter to this end. Let's say it's six inches from the left end of it. That's gonna move that. The supply air, distance from right. So right now, it's right up against there. Let's say it's it's more like 18 inches away. Apply. And then the coil coil height, so that's hot water coil. I go find hot water, coil distance from left. So that's in this direction. I could say that it's different. So let's say that this is actually eight feet. Let's move it there. And then hot water return distance from bottom.

So this one's actually gonna be six inches, and this one's gonna be one feet. Sorry for Nelson in the background. Okay. So I've got those. So you get the idea. Right? Like, you can take this. You can Swiss watch it. You can move it. But another thing that's not so obvious that you can do with it is let's go back into the family editor.

So that was easy, but everything was, like like, the connectors were essentially where I wanted them to be. They were on the bottom. I just needed to move them. That's easy. What about if I want an AHU, that goes inside in the ceiling and the return air duct connection is on the top and the supplier's on the end?

But you can actually do that as well. So, because these are not extrusions, these are nested families that are face hosted that are located using parameters. So let me demonstrate. So if I go into the front, the the correct way to do this is to, delete, which just disassociates the parameters that are controlling where it is location wise. So we're gonna delete that. And then if I, I believe it's reference level. Yeah. Returning our distance from rear. Okay. So this, so now this, is free floating.

Like, I could move it anywhere, including there. And I want it on the top. Since this is a face based hosted family, I can say pick new. In other words, pick new host. Make sure that face is is, selected, and I can put it anywhere on this box that I want. Sometimes Revit like, if sometimes Revit will do this thing where it kinda crosses. If you just hit space bar, it'll wanna snap it together. So I want this on the top, I've said, and I'd I I want it in this this direction, and I'll just click to place. Often Revit is gonna guess incorrectly about which way, you want it. So if it does that, just flip it.

Okay. So now it's on the top, and I want to reassociate its parameters so that I can control where it is in space. So I'm going to go to the front, and I'm gonna type DI for the, tool for the dimension tool. Give it a tool. Do that.

Gonna select that and set it to and I can start typing the name of the parameter. Return air distance from left is what that is. And then I can go to the left view and DI click. It matters it it does matter, which of these you you, click first. So you want to click the reference plane that you want to reference from to the thing that you wanna control.

That change that to air, distance from rear. Okay. So I've got that set. I use the elevations to control those dimensions to set those dimensions and not the reference level because sometimes, like, if I if I do a dimension from here to here, sometimes it's gonna select the the return air connection or something else that I didn't actually want. So that's why I used the front and left because I could get it right on the edge of that extrusion or the edge of that family, which is what I wanted.

Okay. So, you know, I could do let me do a save as family pop dot variant. Oh, and I'm gonna push that into my project. And I can drop that anywhere, and it dropped it off in space somewhere. Oh, let's do here we go.

And so now I've got my I could go after the races. Well, you know what I mean. Well, here, let me just so it doesn't seem like I'm pulling a fast one on you. Draw a duct. Let's go up. Let's go up 10 feet. K. Oftentimes, Revit will pick a a direction you didn't wanna go. If you hit spacebar, it will often, correct it, or it'll do the other way. So even though that looks really goofy, it's probably gonna work. Let's see. Okay. Okay. It was and that I didn't give myself enough space. So I need to go up even further.

20 feet, space bar. Wow. Revit. Oh, it's it's cycling through the middle elevation. That's what it's doing. So let me just go 20 feet. Let me go over here. It did this weird thing, because it sometimes switches those, and I can just fix that. So, again, I forget I forget what it was, but it's something like that. Yeah.

Again, if Revit is freaking out on you with fittings, give your spouse a lot give yourself a lot more space, and then, and then snug it up to whatever you need. So this, I could just drop it down to town, you know, whatever I need. Okay. We've looked at Hydronics flows. We've looked at editing this. We've looked at round, connections. Does anyone else have any other questions about stuff that we've covered so far? Do you have a couple more things to go over? Yeah. Cool.

Okay. So the let's talk about duct routing preferences a bit. So, here, we did this we did this in, in the last session. We did this duct we did this duct bit. And so I'd chosen to use, rectangular radius elbow bevel tap. And there are there's a number of options here for rectangular duct and for round duct. So let's explore these a little bit. I'm gonna go into the go to the here we go. Floor plan. Gonna start drawing some duct, d t.

So radius, that's what we're already using. So, mitered with turning veins, a beveled tap. So if I do this, that's gonna give me a radius, or, turning veins rather, and the taps are doubled. If I oh, and then let's say I want to raw off of it. I want to go round straight tap with a balancing damper, and I want it to be much smaller.

And I go off like that. I'm just gonna put a balancing damper on there. And so, again, Ryan kinda looked at this, already looked at this with the Hydronics. If we click on the edit type here and routing preferences for this rectangular mated with mitered with turning vanes bevel tap, you can create any routing preference system that you want, using, this. So what kind of elbows do you wanna use by standard?

What kind of junction type is it? Is it a tap or a t? And this, you can use different ones here. So you can go through that. And, what I like to do with my naming is I like to number them based on I like to number them based on what I typically use the most.

But, also, once you start using your system, you will just know that, like, you'll just associate the the number with, you know, round, straight tab, radius, whatever, and you'll just look at that, and it'll be a little bit faster. Mike, your question, can you make the duct have a hard elbow then flex, flex down to the diffuser? I don't know if you get I don't I don't I don't know of a way to do that in, in routing preferences. I I feel like so let's make sure that I understand what you're asking me for. So let's say we've got a diffuser, and, let's say that we had, some ducts up here.

It's, it's called feet coming up to it. Basically basically, what you, well, what you want oh, right. Right. Right. D t twelve twelve.

So if you just draw this up to it, it's gonna it's gonna hard duct that. But I think you're I think what you're asking is like, could this just be flex duct? The convert to flex duct, but I but I changed it. Where is that? Convert to flex duct. It didn't do it. I don't use that button. FlexDoc. So I just hit the FlexDoc command, f d, and you can do this to this. Yeah.

And that's flex stuff. In terms of doing that automatically, I don't I can't think off the top of my head of a way of showing that automatically. Like, if I if I had a big off the top of my head without looking into it any further, if if this kind of thing is what I wanted, I had a big project, what I might do is something like, you know, create create this and perhaps make a group, copy this around what I needed, and then it would be pretty trivial to connect into that. So that might be a a a time saving feature. But, yeah, in terms of the routing preferences The only thing I Yeah.

Go ahead, Ron. Yeah. The only thing I could see you can do automatically, I don't know if you'd want to, but if you go to, like, your manage MEP settings, mechanical settings, and then you go to your actual, like, systems of your conversion maybe. Try that. See, like, you can set a supply error, and you could say see the branch?

You could say, I want a certain amount of flex duct, but this only applies to when you do the create, like, a duct system automatically. So it'll automatically draw your flex duct in here, but I don't think it will draw it vertically down unless there's a setting for vertical down or something. But so, like, if you I mean, Tyler probably doesn't do it much. I don't even do it much. But there's, like obviously, if you have air terminals and you wanna, like, create a system and use Revit's, like, automatic, routing or whatever, you can kind of set a minimum length of flex duct, and it will automatically, like, pop it down to your, stuff.

But I don't know if it does a vertical. Yeah. That would be that would be a pretty a pretty a pretty specialized thing. So, yeah, I think the answer, Mike, is no automatic way to do that. The best you could do is probably, like, create it, copy it, put it around. You could, you know, make a you make, like, a group flex elbow or something like that, and then you could, you know, sort of paste this around. And then once you wanted to connect them, you'd have to ungroup them. So, yeah, it's an interesting one. Of course, the the the cynical engineer in me says make that a detail. I'm just I'm just add Yeah.

I would definitely make that a because you can't even tell it's flex. Like, I can't even see the the veins. Right? Like, can't even tell You know? It does really have to do I mean, that that that really is you know, because, like, consuming your model. For a lot of jobs, smaller jobs, people are aren't even consuming your model at all. They're just consuming your PDFs. So sheet note is the right answer in that. But in some context, people are people are consuming your model. The contractor is linking your model in to Navis or whatever it is that they use these days. They're looking at everything. They're going over with a fine tooth comb. Maybe you're doing LOD three fifty. Maybe you're doing more, you know, very nearly, you know, shop shop level. Outfits are doing that.

So, you know, it's it's not out of this world that that could be a an appropriate thing to do. But, you you know, kinda the the big thing, of course, for, you know, everyone listening, and I say this all the time because this is a thing that we had to really work through in my firm that I was the manager at was nothing is as wasteful as doing well something that doesn't need to be done at all. So we are always trying to be, on guard about that. Okay. Let's see.

I've only got a couple minutes left here. Yeah. So if if anyone has any other questions, feel free to drop them drop them in the chat. I might just I'm gonna do a speed. I'm gonna do a speed.

See if I can convert this into a fan coil unit in two and a half minutes. Or pipe label a unit. It's giving those errors because I didn't, remove the parameters first. Pointing in the wrong direction. And in this one, I want it to be symmetric.

It's not gonna go.

We missed this one. I think we're out time. So pretty close. Another minute, and I'll have it. Thanks for showing up, everyone. This was great. Looking forward to next week's sessions. We're gonna talk about, more space analysis. We're gonna talk about pipe volume calculations. We're gonna dive more into annotations and tagging, things you can do with spaces. And then any other questions that you have between now and then, so you should all have access to the workflow videos, of course. So anything that's coming up for you, at the time, going through that, bring them send them to me in advance. That's cool. My email is [email protected].

Feel free to hit me up. Looking forward to seeing you all again. So thanks, everyone. Thanks for your questions, and see you in a minute for Electrical if you're hanging around for that. Thanks, Tyler. Yeah. Must have missed that one. Here we go. Mhmm. Yeah.

I think it's because I still have that. Trick was going fast. Deal with that later. Anytime, when you get a chance, can sync, and then I can pick up, like Oh, yeah. The same model that you have.

Yeah. Let me do that. I haven't synced it a while. Orion stuff is gonna be all on my way now. Alright. I'm gonna end the call. See you guys in a little bit for John's thing. Yeah. Stop.