Launchpad Session #2 - Mechanical

Alright. Cool. Have the chat open. Everyone's AI has taken notes. Alright. Cool. So let's get started. Feel free to jump in with questions or anything. Drop them in the chat or there's only a few of us, so, feel free to just, hop on the voice as well. So we've got what I wanted to do today is, so we've in the last session, we talked about hydraulics, pipe flow and sizing, editing families, the nested families thing.

We discussed duck routing preferences, and I kinda talked a little bit about the philosophies of overmodeling versus appropriate modeling. Right? You know, like I noted in here, like, depending on the phase of your project, you don't need to connect all of the pipes to every little single thing. So a lot of going fast in Revit doesn't necessarily always look like going fast. It looks like thinking about what you're doing and not doing what you don't need to do.

And then you can slowly and smoothly execute execute that which you do need to do and which is actually gonna provide value value for the project. I'm not sharing my screen. Let me share my screen. There we go. Bring the call back here. Cool. So we've got the workflow videos. It goes into some depth on the modeling and everything. So what I wanted to do today was to talk more about some things that aren't covered yet in those workflow videos. There's some stuff that I've just been developing recently that I will be getting in there, but they're not there now.

So I thought it'd be good to talk about that, a little bit. And some of the stuff, it might not actually go into that because it might go into some other module or or something. And that's because what I wanted to focus on today is some of the design things, some of the fancy stuff that you can do in building information modeling tools like Revit, that you can't necessarily do in most CAD packages. That comes with a warning or a caution rather because something that I saw so I started in Revit in 2009, 2010, and something that I saw with adoption was that there was the promise that with Revit, because it was building information modeling and there was it was a big spreadsheet with a three d graphical interface, there was a lot of cool things you could do to make it go faster, that you could pull design activity out of Excel and into the model, and you could hook that up to a computer, and it could go faster. It's true up to a point, but what I saw a lot of what I saw happen at firms and with people is that, typically, you got people who are really excited about this cool Revit stuff, and they were power users.

And they would start doing a bunch of cool stuff, and they were bored with making drawings look good because that's just what we've been doing since forever. And they would try to get everyone to do all this fancy stuff that was easy for them because they were super nerds about it. And the the firm would be tripping on simply producing good looking contract deliverables, good drawings that were coordinated and looked good and appropriate and were done, on time. And so some of the stuff I'm gonna talk about today in in your own Revit journey depending on where you're at, kind of echoing the overmodeling topic, you wanna think about where in your journey you are and what to focus on. And in my view, the the place to focus on is figuring out how to quickly and efficiently without losing your mind to frustration, make good looking drawings quickly with Revit.

Because as as we're moving to Revit, some of us have a choice. Some of us have less less of a choice because we're getting, contracts where it's a requirement for us to deliver in Revit. And so we've gotta figure out how to make our core product good using this tool, either because we've chosen or because we kinda don't have a choice anymore. Revit can do a lot of other stuff, but I really encourage you to get good at that before you try to take on too much of the extra fancy stuff because you can it is very easy to get lost in the weeds, fiddling with settings, figuring out where Revit's strong and where Revit's weak, where you can hack it together. And then all of a sudden, you've blown half your week trying to make some weird calc thing work that you could have done in twenty minutes in your old Excel calculator spreadsheet or whatever, but you were trying to get it to, to do in in Revit, or you're just not fast yet at making the drawings look good.

So focus if you're not there yet, focus on figuring out how to become comfortable and highly competent unconsciously at making good drawings in Revit. And who cares if it's connected? Who cares if the systems are good? Who cares if there's pipe flow going through it? You know how to design stuff. Do that. Make the drawings look good. Get it out the door. Once you get comfortable with that, you can start doing the cool fancy stuff. So that's kind of a philosophy principle level thing. Morning. Morning. Oh, you you were talking to someone else. I, yeah. So so that's the caution here.

With that said, the other danger is that you just use Revit for making drawings, and then you never take advantage of some of the power and the tools that are embedded in it. I think I did that to a little extent partly because, as in my role as a BIM manager, I was training. I was helping people come up. So I was responsible for a lot of people. We're at various stages of Rev, and I was just trying to get our drawings good and out the door. But, once you do become competent and solid at, at producing your contract deliverables, then you can start saying, okay. What, you know, what is Revit good at? Could I do duct sizing? Duct sizing is pretty easy. How about pipe sizing?

It's a little bit more complex. Let's look into that. Is that gonna work? Could I do expansion take, volume sizing? Could I do external static pressure calcs? Like, start looking at that and start kind of pulling pieces into Revit as you get good at them. And I think that's an approach that you can use to, over time, increase your speed, your efficacy, and start pulling sign in. There's another angle to this, and this is all relevant to what I'm actually gonna start showing you in a second here. In some firms, depending on so there's there's different ways that you can do work in Revit. There's different models depending on the size of your firm.

So there's the there's engineers who mostly aren't in Revit. They're gonna be doing red lines and maybe Bluebeam or, you know, whatever. They're giving direction to the drafters, the designers, whatever your term for those staff is. And the drafters might do not much design activity. And in firms like that, the other model is, the engineer does everything or the designer kinda does everything, and then the OR just checks at the end.

But in the model where there is sort of the drafter engineer split, sometimes the engineer can become a bottleneck. We've seen this, with some of our, recent clients is that the engineers have so much design work to do before the drafters can get started that the engineers are the bot the yeah. The engineers are the bottleneck, and the drafters are kind of waiting around for clear markups to crank. Well, in that instance, there are things that with Revit, drafters can do to kind of pull some of the design load off of the engineers into the software, to help debottleneck the engineers who can then kind of take a more supervisory checking role. Not to take any of the responsibility off of the engineers, but to just kind of diffuse that load, of the design activity a little bit more.

So that's the big picture of, like, kinda what I wanted to talk about and something that I think is important to think about and don't get don't get lost in the don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. Right? So with that said, I wanna do kind of a tour of some of the things, that you can do with Revit from a, you know, smart perspective. Again, maybe use it as a, like, okay. Maybe when I get to that point, I will start looking at this or maybe, okay. I'm ready. I'm gonna do, these things. That looks interesting. I could pull that into my practice now. And, some of the assets I'm gonna talk about aren't in the downloads that you have as part of foundations yet.

So I'm either gonna show you in this video how to build it, or, I might send a a a download link, to you so that you could get some of the assets. Okay. So, one thing that, kinda drives me nuts is, is doing zone plans in Bluebeam. And when you've got a perfectly good Revit model that can do zone plans, and then it it can build on other things. So we've got a, a zone plan sheet in view, and I'm going to double click in it.

So I've activated this view. So this is a view that is a floor plan that I've just turned off all the ducts, mechanical equipment, everything. So I'm just seeing the background pretty much. Oh, and and by the way, so this section here that we can see on this view, there's nothing filled out here. This means it's not on a sheet.

And when you export or print so if you if we go to export PDF, this little button right here, hide unreferenced view tags, that means that this, it's not gonna print this. So you don't need to go through hiding those. If if this section is on a sheet, Revit will show the section on the PDF. So you don't need to worry about that, you know, those kinds of things, unless they're annoying you, as you're working. Okay.

So zone plans. I would like to graphically represent my zone plan for, this project. So we're gonna use what's called, spaces. So let's go to the systems tab or, rather analyze tab, and I'm gonna click the space button. And Revit is telling me spaces are not currently visible in this view. And that's because I actually just want HVAC zones. I'm using some words that maybe you're not familiar with yet. It'll make sense in a second. So architects have rooms when they create their model. Rooms which are, basically analytical volumes that there's no physical aspect of it.

It's just, Revit looks at the floor, the ceiling, or the roof, and the walls, and it says, this is a room. They name it. They number it. And then we can as MEP engineers, we can take spaces, and the spaces basically look at the same bounding. And then it reads the information from the architect's room, and it says, okay. This is the room that I'm associated with. And then HVAC zones are groups of spaces. So we want a floor plan that shows our zoning plan, which is composed of spaces. We need to get our spaces first. Ultimately, we don't wanna see the spaces on this particular view.

We just wanna see the zones because that's what we're trying to communicate. But I need to place the spaces in order first to, get the zones defined. So what I'm gonna do since this is saying, like, hey. They're not visible. So what that means is, so I'm gonna place a space here. You can see it says space, and you can kinda see it's it snaps to the the bounding of the walls and such. So if I place that, you can't see anything. So but I would like to see it temporarily, and, so that I can, define my HVAC zones. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, hit escape a couple times, get out of that tool. And down here in the bottom, there's a temporary view properties button.

It's quite useful. I'm gonna click this, say enable temporary view properties. Now in this mode, any changes I make to visibility graphics, once I deactivate this mode, it'll reset to whatever I had. So I've got a view template, which is in in sheet zone. And in this view template, spaces are turned off. I'm gonna hit v g, and it will let me edit this. So I'm gonna go to spaces, and I wanna see those. I'm gonna check it, and say, okay. And now I can see my space tag. And if I if I mouse over the the space definition, I can see it.

So I'm gonna finish, placing my spaces. So come here, space, and then there's a button that says place spaces automatically. And I am just gonna do that, and Revit will fill in the rest of the spaces. So usually pretty good at that. Now one thing I know since this is a dual height space, the limit offset on this should be about 20 feet, so it picks up the air terminals above it. And these also these also should be something like, like, nine feet, something like that. Spaces have their their volume. They have a height to them, so you wanna, make sure that the height is, also set correctly. Okay. So I have my spaces, set.

And now we can see in here, this is the space tag, and this is the room tag. So the room tag is reading the room information from the architect's model, and I would like to get the spaces to report the same name and number. There is a button for that. It's a space naming button, and you just basically click okay, and it pulls in the information from the, from the rooms. Okay.

And now I would like to define my HVAC zones, which are just composed of spaces. So if I hit the zone button, this, the central workshop warehouse area, this is one zone. So I just click that. I hit finish editing zone, and then I hit zone again, and I'm going to box select these, spaces over here. Finish editing zone.

Hit zone again, and I'm gonna box select these, because I'm just doing a very simple zone zone thing for the purposes of this thing. Okay. So I've now got my HVAC zones, which is what I wanna represent on this. I don't need to see spaces anymore. And the reason I wanna turn them off is because when you're tagging things, it can just get kind of confusing if you got both spaces and zones shown. So now I can click this button and say restore view properties. It'll set it back to whatever I had it before. In this case, it's set to a view template, so I'm just gonna rerestore the view template settings. And I can no longer see my space tags. And if I mouse over this, it's not showing me the spaces.

And I'm gonna hit TL for thin line so that you can see that I have settings here so that the HVAC zones orders are quite thick, so you can see those. And then, there's a color scheme in here, which is in the view template, view template color scheme, HVAC zones, which is automatically colors them different so that you can see something. If you don't like the colors, you can change those to different hash patterns so you can have it, you can have those look any way you like. Okay. So, so we've got them.

Now we'd we'd like to have them tagged. So I'm gonna hit t g for tag, and then I'm gonna mouse over the border, and it's gonna give me its tag. So it's giving me the HVAC zone name and the area. And there and there and there. And now I can come in here, and I can click on this to rename it.

So this is R T U Dash 1, and this is HU1. This is H U 2. Alright. Okay. So I like that. Now this is obviously very simple project, three zones. But on a bigger project, it could be very useful. We might want a list of the zones and the areas to do some analysis worth with. I think I have yeah. So I have a I have a schedule.

Oops. I need to be out of the view. So now I'm in the sheet. So I'm just gonna click and drag this schedule that I've made, and it's a very simple schedule. It just has the zones listed, the occupied area listed, and it's summed it up.

And if I double click on this, and you look at the fields, you can see that it's got the level. And I you can't see this. It's a hidden field, but we'll show it. So it's got the level, which is hidden, the name, and the occupied area. In filter, the reason I have level included in this is so that I can use the filter because I want this schedule to only show me the zones on level one.

So level equals m e p o one, which is the name of my level, and, that is good for that. Does the area include room interior, exterior walls? So, yeah, let's take a look at that. So, I'm going to hop over to a different view to do some, exploration of that. So this is our zone plan. We could plot this out, use it to communicate, whatever we wanna do, mark it up. So this this can be a useful thing. Whether or we actually wanna issue this sheet, this sheet can be useful for internal internal coordination, etcetera. Okay. So I'm gonna hop over to view.

I have an analysis section in my working views, and I'm gonna go to mix spaces and zones. So in this view, I have spaces and HRX zones turned on, and I can see I can see I I can see them both. I can see the this interior. I have this stuff turned on as well. So we click on this space. Let's see. Should list it out. It's not occupied. Area would be in here. Occupiable.

So the so the oh, I see. The area so the area for this space is saying is one ninety two. If you look at the the bounds of this space, you can see that the boundary is, on the inside of the walls. And the these if you click on the the HVAC zone, it's got a few different areas that it's listing. So it's listing occupied area, gross area, and then occupied volume.

These are exactly the same, the occupied and the gross. I think that's because you can define certain spaces. It's not occupiable. So, like, if I click this, I think there's yeah. And I unchecked occupiable, and then it came back to my zone. You can see there's now a difference between occupied area and gross area. I believe what it's doing, it'd be good to verify this, because that's a very good question. It'd be good to verify that I'm correct, that my assumption is that it's adding up just the actual interior spaces and not including the, you know, the the wall volume thickness as part of that. It'd be pretty pretty simple to do to check that out. Let's check this back to occupiable.

Okay. So we've got our we've got our zone plan, and now we're still we're doing some we're still, initial design. We would like to get, some ventilation numbers for us. And I think I did this really fast in that very first pre session. Maybe you were there, maybe you weren't. I'm trying to go a little bit slower so you can see what's actually going on here. So we've got spaces, and we've got zones. And so I'm I'm kind of going slow through an activity that, drafter anyone in the Revit model could be doing because it's a very repeatable process. Okay. So this this is my, mech spaces and zones analysis, view.

I'm going to, hit t g for tag, and I wanna tag, I wanna tag my spaces. That's showing difficulty. Wait. What's that? Yeah. So I think I might need to turn off the HVAC zone so that I can tag my spaces. So I'm going to hit the enable temporary view properties again. Fiji, I'm gonna turn off HVAC zones, and I'm gonna tag. Oh, it's wow. I guess oh, you have to hit the special button for it.

Okay. So I'm now hitting the special button for for space tags. Normally, my workflow, I changed my workflow to demonstrate some things. My normal workflow is to create the spaces in this view. And when you do that, it automatically dumps the tags on the spaces. So I hadn't actually tagged spaces in a while. So to tag a space, You have to go up to the space tag button. You can't just use t g for tag, which is a little strange. But I'm gonna opt to do a leader. And now the the default space tag is just name and number.

Not very interesting. I'm going to switch over to outside air analysis tag, which has a whole bunch of stuff on it. So I'm gonna click, no. It's not letting me place the leader. That's also annoying. Click. Click. Click. And then here and then here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Now now that those are placed, I could move these around a little bit. Get them.

I'm actually just I'm just gonna do these. We're just gonna kinda look at one one wing in a little bit more depth. Okay. So what's going on with these tags? Pipe building. What is that? So it's reading from this space, which as you're seeing, there's a lot of parameters associated with this. There's specified airflow, calculated airflow, actual supply airflow. There's electrical lighting, loads. There's a whole bunch of stuff in here.

So spaces are basically where Revit is saying, like, what kind of space is this? And it's when the building gets really smart. It's not just polygons. Right? It's actual information baked into this. This is also the basis of if you're going to try to do load models using Revit or Autodesk infrastructure, this is what you would use, which we're not gonna talk about. I don't do loads in Revit. I haven't done loads in a long time, actually, but there are tools that you can use. Right out of the box, Revit loads isn't a thing. I think they actually pulled it out of Revit.

You they used to have a broken ability to do it, and I think they just finally switched it off. But they have, like, a export to the cloud thing. That's a whole another discussion. Space, so pipe building. So the space type in this, we can set it to whatever kind of space we want. These are all kind of the out of the box predefinitions. You can create your own. And so this is a conference room. So we go to conference meeting multipurpose, and this is where it has all the default settings for area per person. You know?

Sensible heat game per person, so you can fill all of these out. And, like, in your template, you can have these defined. You could strip out all the stuff you never use so that this list isn't so long, and just fill it with the typespaces that you typically use. Okay. So I'm using, conference room. And then, this is giving me some other information in here. And so, for those of you who've done ventilation calculations, some of these, some of these, should look familiar. Revit doesn't think in terms of people for thousand square foot, so I've made a calculated parameter that reports that. It thinks in terms of square foot per person. So if you're used to looking at that, you have to, do a translation.

So okay. So so each of these spaces is is is has got this information associated with it. So I'm just gonna quickly add the definitions. So this is an office. Gonna call this, and you can do a search here to find it.

Open plan. This is, like, dining, and this is, like, electrical electric mechanical. This is something like a workshop. This is also electromechanical. Mechanical.

And you can multiselect. So these are let me get this out of the way. So these are both bathrooms. So I can select both of them. Just hold down control and click and where do ah, there we go. Space type, restroom, storage. Let's call it inactive storage, and this is, like, reception. Might be called lobby. So yeah. Lounge oh, not recreation.

Reception. Yeah. See, and this is some of these maybe don't, like, line up with exactly what you want. This is why you might need to define you know, enter in your own definitions and define them. But okay. So we've got all those, we've got all those, set. I'll just point out something else. Revit spaces know if there's air going into them. So this, this air terminal, it's got a 110. So there's two of them. So there's 220 CFM of air being supplied to the space. And lo and behold, Revit actually knows that. So we're gonna use that in a second because that's pretty interesting. So okay. So we've got this.

Now I can turn off temporary view properties, so we can see our zones, our zone definitions. And, okay. So okay. So we've got that. But, you know, now we've just got this floor plan with tags, there's a bunch of data on it. Like, how is this actually useful? We've got a sheet set up for that. Ventilation floor plan. Again, you might not wanna issue this, but sometimes sheets are nice to arrange your design activities so you can see them. You could print them.

You see them, review them, mark them up. That can be a nice thing to do. You don't like, sheets don't necessarily have to only be for things that you issue, So just keep that in mind. Okay. So we've got this ventilation calculation schedule that I've made. So what's what is it scheduling? It's scheduling spaces. Spaces, each of these rows is a space. So you can see here, we just set all of these all the types. You know, we we change these.

It, it is set. It's telling us what these are. So I also could have if I go into this, I could have come in here and just click that. So you can just go down this. You can just go down the column updating it here. So that can be a little bit faster. And then the rest of the columns are built out ventilation calculation. So here's the area, and I'm, you know, I'm using the acronyms that you're used to seeing in the ASHRAE formula. So it should be fairly familiar. Some differences.

So, like, here's square foot per person. And here, I've I've given in in people per thousand square foot because I believe that's how Ashray thinks about it. So you can you have to enter it here, or you have to enter it in area per person in the space schedule. But then we this column calculates it so you can kinda check it and make sure that it's right. So you just kinda need to translate between those two.

And then it's giving you number of people, out there after every person. It's going through all all of the calcs for you. So we got our v b z. It doesn't automatically populate the zone air effectiveness, so you'd have to type it in. And so if you watch let me zoom in a little bit, make it a little bit easy for you to see. So here's the the final output, the zone outdoor air calculation. It's v o z times v p z divided by e z. It's not gonna do this calc until it has all the values it needs. And so I can just fill these out. As I do it, it finishes the calc.

For me, if I had a huge project, I might use a plug in to push the schedule to Excel so that I could fill out some stuff without having to click because Revit doesn't let you just click and drag and do some other things that are quicker in Excel. Okay. So I've got I've got my numbers. And throughout the process, I have not given Revit the instruction to round up because I don't want it to. I don't necessarily trust it. I wanted to, you know, keep the sig figs for me. And then here, this is a parameter that I created, or let's see. Rather, zone out there. EventEasy zone out there. Yeah.

So this this schedule is a mix of parameters that come from Revit that are baked into space definitions and some shared parameters that I've added to make this schedule work the way I want it to work. So, like, this is a calculated parameter. This is a parameter that comes from the space definition. Area comes from the space definition. The easy parameter, this is a shared parameter that I created.

As event specified outdoor air, that's a parameter that I created. So as you can see, Revit Revit was, like, 90 for my purposes, for this calc, Revit was 95% there. And I just, added a couple more things to make this schedule work the way I wanted it to work. So, anyways, at this point in the process, I'm looking at this, and I'm going, okay. I'm making a decision about what I want to communicate that I want these values to be.

That's the bathroom right there. Zero. You know, four sixty five, whatever. And so now I've got I've got my specified outside air. And the outside air ratio, specified outside air over design, supplier.

I believe that's what it is. Design, yeah, design, supplier. This isn't populated because I haven't yet given my specified, supplier. But, up to here so I've I've pretty quickly and I'm going slower because I'm explaining it. But pretty quickly, just about anyone could get a lot of the kinda legwork done to get your ventilation calc going based on the areas and everything, and the spaces that are in Revit.

So that's, so that's that can be pretty useful. And and and these are these are grouped by zone. I kinda forgot to mention that. But so these are all grouped by the zone based on, what those are. And then I've I've put in here also the supply air, and I put this in here because, some people like to see outdoor air ratio.

So I'm just going to show something pretty quickly, and then you can, and then we're gonna jump to, something else. So I think it's I think it's this. Yeah. So you can see this updated the outdoor air ratio. Once I started typing in values for the this is the specified or design supplier.

So I started typing in here. But I just created a quick this is this is this is purely a rule of thumb calculator here that someone could do. So if they know, like, whatever your standards are based on, you know, your climate and everything, you can just type get a quick CFM per square foot that you wanna use for supplier. So, you know, it could be that. I think that's the bathroom, there. So now I've also tried to to name these columns, pretty well so you don't get confused about what's going on. So this is saying this is a supplier based on rule of thumb. This is a calc. It's a rule of thumb. This isn't your loads model or anything like that.

And then I can say, okay. That's that. So, and I can enter in the what I want the the design supplier to be. So here, I got one ten, two fifteen, one ninety, two seventy, 2.25, Two sixty is bathrooms. Yeah.

Thirty twenty. It's giving me my my outdoor air ratio here for the specified. Okay. So that can be that can be a big that can be a pretty big help, particularly early on. Because as you've seen with the pipe sizing, with the particularly the duct sizing rather, When I'm modeling Airside in Revit, I use either intuition or a quick rule of thumb calc to when I'm laying out my duct, and I can get that done.

And then if I need to make tweaks to that based on the loads model or more refined numbers of what I need, it's pretty easy to do. I just can update the air terminals, verify that the air flows are what my design is, and then I can have Revit help me quickly, make tweaks to the duct sizing. I don't need to be going through every piece with my ductulator figuring it out. Boy, it'd be really sad for me if junior engineers these days don't use ductulators. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope I don't contribute to that. Because what a precious memory. Okay. So okay. So we've got that.

This would now, this would enable us to do quite a lot, get cranking on our, on our airside modeling. And so that that can be a big help. Another thing we can do is we could build a air balance schedule at the space level and at the zone level. So I'm gonna show how to do that from scratch. So let's go it should be pretty smooth.

So let's go schedules, schedule quantities, and I'm going to do this to spaces. I'm gonna give it a name, space, or balance. Alright. So I'm looking for actual supplier flow and specified, supplier flow, specified return. Let's see specified exhaust, and then actual return, and actual exhaust actual exhaust.

K. So move that up. Just specify the actual specific. And then let's also add in, like, name and number of the spaces so we know what we're doing here. Alright. Move this up. These are more complicated building. You know, I might do something like add the level parameters or filters. So I just looked at this level by level to keep things sorted, but I don't. This is simple, so I don't need to do that. I will add the zone so that we can keep things organized. So okay. Let's see what that looks like. Kind of disorganized. It's a bit much.

So let's do a couple things to, make it look better. So I need to change that to that. And then in sorting grouping, I'm going to sort by zone and add a blank line, itemize every instance. You know, that that helps. That's quite a bit better to look at, see what we're doing here.

And then I'm also going to make all of these center aligned. Okay. So I can now take let's move this over, and let's take that schedule that I just made, which threw it into the triple question mark. So let's keep this organized, and let's move this to mechanical analysis. Space air balance, and I'll drop this on my sheet so I can see it. Alright. So I've got my hands put I actually wanna move it over here because we're gonna look on this side of the building. Okay. Space air balance and zone h U 1. This is the H U 1 zone over here.

And meeting one, 107, this is the space here. That's what we're looking at. Okay. So I've so I'm saying from my ventilation calc and my supplier rule of thumb calc up here, I've said supplier specified, for that space, which is 107, which is the second row, is 220. Sorry for zooming around if you're making you motion sickness. Alright. Let's try to keep it keep it together. So I've said my specified supply airflow, airflow is two fifteen. The actual air, supply airflow is two twenty. Where is that coming from?

That's coming from, as I mentioned, the air terminals. The space knows how much airflow is coming into it. It's actually reading that. So, so if I change this, like, if I change this to, one zero seven point five I I know this is ridiculous. You would never do that. Change these both one plus 7.5. You know, there we go. We've got our we've got our two fifteen. So that's that can be that can be quite nice. That also suggests that we can automatically do air balance in a space.

So, well, to do that, I need I need some other air terminals. Let's get, return air. Yep. And make sure I'm not gonna put on the floor. Yep. So eight foot. Sounds about right. So let's put that there. And I I can also tag these here so I can see what my airflow is. And this isn't a view that's going on my sheet, so I'm maybe not really caring about, you know, the presentation of the tags and things.

Okay. So here we go. Specified and actual return airflow. So this is like, so one possible workflow you could have if particularly, you've got the drafter engineer, workflow, you could you could push this Excel, you could push this schedule to Excel, have the columns for the engineer to fill out or the designer to fill out, and they can come in here and say specified. Right? For this one, this is this we want this to be, like, that two ten. Okay? Can't enter into can't enter that because that's not where that it's reading information. It's not setting information. And specified exhaust, yeah, it's yeah.

There's there's nothing there. So we come back over here so we can set this to you should be reading off of there. Okay. This should be 02:10. And, so now our actual matches are specified, and, we can go on down like this.

And so we've got that, but we would like to have a column that says, you know, what's the actual pressure in CFM. Right? So let's go to fields, and let's go to the end. And then if we click this button, it's add a calculated parameter. So the name of this is going to be results in pressure CFM, and then I like to say, when I'm doing sometimes, particularly here, I like to specify exactly what the formula is, minus r a minus c d a.

The discipline is HVAC, and the type is airflow. It's it's necessary to set this. Reddit won't let you do the wrong units. So we do that. And then I'm going to say, formula actual supply airflow minus actual return airflow minus actual exhaust airflow.

Let me do that. Let me hit okay. And this is going to give me the results in pressure. So, again, I can't enter it because it's a it's a calc. And so if I changed, like if I change specified to, you know, I don't know, 50 oh, nope. Not to be 10. I meant to specify this one. So we change this to, like, a 100. Oh, that's interest oh, yeah. Because it's it's the actual, not the resultant.

Hang on. I did the wrong thing. Two fifteen. So if I, so here it is. If I change this to yeah. I can do it there. And it's now telling me that I've got, extra. And if I'm if I type in something crazy like 500, you know, it's gonna say, okay. Something weird is going on. That that doesn't make sense, right, because it's not it's not being pulled.

So so you can also pretty quickly set up an air balance schedule and set that back to something correct. And and then, so that's fine. It's giving it's giving you a kinda room by room, space by space, right, setting for that. If you want it summed up for the over each zone, you just come in here to formatting, and, you can add what, whatever you want here. But for this, you just have to tell it to calculate.

So if we do that, it doesn't do anything because you have to come over here, and you can say, give it a footer so that the footer will go under whatever the group thing is happening. And so we can change this to totals only, and we can say, okay. So this is our resultant pressure for for the zone for all these spaces. So that is, so that's that that is another thing you can do. It's kind of like I mean, there there's a there's a good bit of information baked into the model, baked into Revit that out of the box, Revit doesn't have, like, here.

Here's your calculation table for you. Here's your design for you. But the information is there that you can use. The trick is is finding the information that you, a, trust. So, I like, don't trust external static pressure calcs on Revit, for example, because it hasn't figured out the whole fitting thing. It's just been broken since they shipped it a quarter of a century ago. And, yeah, there's there's other things I don't trust. But for things that you either do trust or that you can verify, you know, you can set it up and say, like, is it working? I'm gonna side by side check it. Okay.

It's working. You you verify that you you kinda trust what it's doing. Like, this is pretty simple, and you understand some of, like, what it's good for and what it's not good for, then, you can you can pull these into into your into your practice. Okay. So that's, that's the air balance.

Did that. So another another interesting one that I like to show is okay. So let's get out of here. So we've got some pipe, and we've got a tank expansion tank. Wouldn't it be cool if Revit could help us with our system volume calc? It turns out it can. And this is something that you can just build, have in your template, and reuse over and over again. I'm gonna show you how to build it because it's important, I think, to know how to build it. If you if you can build it, you can understand it, and you can use it and understand what it's good for and what it's not good for. So let's do that.

So what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to build a calc that gives us the volume of the straight pipes and then another one that gives us the volume of the fittings. So schedules, schedule quantities. Let's do let's do pipe. Let's do the straight length of pipe first. Pipes.

And we're so we're gonna do we're gonna call this heating hot water pipe straight length volume calc. So we need system abbreviation, and we need length. Length. Length. Length. L. And we need inner diameter, inside diameter. We're gonna throw comments in. We don't need it for this, but we we'll throw it in because we'll we'll talk about, some things that you can do. Alright.

Let's see what we got here. So we've got a whole bunch of, rows. This is all the sticks of pipe in here. This is the system abbreviation. So we've got a bunch of Ryan's crap in here. So let's get that out. Filter is what I meant to click. So filter by system abbreviation begins with, h h w. I'm missing on my keyboard here. H w. Alright. So that just that got rid of everything that's not heating hot water return or supply. So I've got that. And then we've got, this is showing us our length and our inside diameter. We also have comments.

The reason I throw comments in here is because you can use comments as a filtering parameter, which could be useful if you're trying to get Revit to help you, for example, tell you what the length of pipe is for the critical run of your pipe if you're doing a pressure calc, something like that. We're we're not gonna use it here because we want to get all of the volume from all the pipes in the system. So we want the volume. If you look at, if you click on it, unfortunately, it doesn't have the volume of a pipe. Even though it'd be really easy for it to do, I think they should do it, but it's an easy enough thing for us to calculate for ourselves.

So let's go to fields, and we want to make a calculated parameter, it's going to we're gonna call it pipe volume. This plan is gonna be common. The type is gonna be volume, and the formula is going to be length times 3.14 times inside diameter raised to two divided by four. Area length should be volume. Cool? Okay. So let's just let's just show what that spits out. By default, it's cubic feet. I don't know. I like to think in terms of gallons, I'm pretty sure, so I'm gonna change that.

You can control the formatting. So I click pipe volume. I can come here to field format. By default, it uses the project settings, which is up here in manage project units. So I could just change the whole project units, but I could also change one of the nice things about setting it in here, if the project settings are what you want, is someone else could change the project setting at some point, and then it could it could be a whole thing. So I gotta change it to US gallons here. I don't need two decimal points. Just one is fine. K. Alright.

So I've got my gallons, and then, we just we just talked about how you can add this up. So if I go to formatting, pipe volumes, set this to calculate totals, sorting grouping. And I can I can do grand totals because I'm not sorting this? I can just put this here, totals only, and it will just sum up down here at the bottom. So I got 33 gallons in the straight lengths of my pipe. There's another housekeeping thing I can do here. So this is cool. You know? I mean, this is fine. But if I'm putting it on a sheet, I don't need to see every single stick of pipe, particularly on a bigger project.

So I'm gonna go sorting grouping. I'm gonna sort by it's kind of arbitrary. System abbreviation. Oh, and then I'm going to uncheck itemize every instance. There we go. So it's it just makes it shorter is all that's doing, but it still gives me the numbers. Interestingly, the the cool thing for the pipe volume is that it's it's showing me this isn't this doesn't matter here, but it's showing me what the volume is for each of the different systems. I don't know why there's a gallon difference between the two. I guess one of the pipes is longer than the other. Okay.

So I've got my straight length of pipe. Now, and let's see. Let's go to a sheet calculations. Go to it, which I totally didn't already just do this work. You know what? Let's do the one that I'm actually building for you guys. Here we go. Alright. So got that number. And, again, in your template, you can have this already built.

So you build this once, and then every project you ever do for the rest of your life, you just get the volume of the stuff. Let's go build the fitting schedule. It's actually easier. Oops. Fittings. Pipe fittings. And we're gonna call this water on pipe fitting on calculation two. We're going to add the system abbreviation. Cool thing is that for fittings, Revit calcs the volume for you because otherwise, that would be annoying. There's rules of sums you can use for those, but, it does it for us.

So cool. What else did I need? Volume. I could add comments. Don't really need to. I think that might be it. K. Check it out. Yeah. Filter it filter it for system abbreviation begins with, you know, art. Yeah. So we can just add that up. This one's really easy. Volume, show the totals. Come back here.

Don't itemize every instance. Show the grand totals, and we're going to sort by system abbreviation. And we're going to set this to gallons. Yeah. This one this one's easy. Not a lot. I think some people don't even bother doing that if they just use it. You know? It it's within the margin. Margin and safety. Oh, yeah. It's up here. So we'll get this. Yeah. That was that was the step I missed.

Change the appearance so it's not insane. Alright. So we've got we've got this. How are we doing on time? We've only got five minutes left. Okay. So I wanna show you something that I think is cool. For small little calcs and stuff, you can build families that do your calcs for you. So this is the expansion tank volume calc. So here I've got this is the exact same thing I just built.

So we've got our volumes here. You also need to know the volumes of your coils and things like that, of course. But you take those. In this family, I have built, you know, the tank volume sizing equation, and you can literally just click in here and change the numbers. And so, like, okay. Let's say if this is 60 and you change these. I haven't done this calc in so long. I don't even know what, like, borderline reasonable values are. So sorry if this is insane. But you can, do that, and it just updates it.

I think it's really cool. So over here, you could also add it here, in the parameters. These are all these are all the, they're all right right. Missed it. They're all right here. This is kind of a recent thing that I figured out how to start doing. This is just a generic annotation family. It's the same kind of thing you'd use for, like, a symbol, like that pipe continuation thing that Ryan showed. It's the same category of equipment. Let me show you what's going on.

So if we edit this family, so we've got you know, this is just text. This is just text. These are parameters family parameters. So, they're called labels and generic annotations. A label is, it's not necessarily text, but it's a value that you can input information in. So this one, the expansion factor, we click on that. I click on this, and that's the format. Oh, yeah. Here it is. The edit family parameter. So I'm gonna click on that. I'm just gonna look at it. So it's saying that this is a number. It's an instance parameter. Okay.

Versus system volume. What's going on with this one? This is the discipline is common. It's volume. Okay. Pressure. One of these pressure, it is a piping type, and the type of pressure is pressure. And I've also, p one. I have set the, I've set the unit to PSI. Okay.

So, and then here, volume of the tank, this is a calculated parameter. We've been we've seen those a few times already today. And so now I can click on this, which is edit calculated parameter, and it's just it's just this formula. It's using these parameters, so it's doing this calc. So I I think this is kinda brilliant.

I like the idea of being able to pull a number of, like, kinda small calcs where you're pulling it you're getting information out of the drawings, the model anyway, putting them into Revit, having the answer there documented. Because some of these things, you know, depending on your code reviewer, they might wanna see the calc on your cover sheet or, you know, somewhere else. They they like seeing those kinds of things. These are the kind of things that you can build into it. Because you do this in Revit, it is fussy and annoying.

Like, if you if you've got your expansion tank volume calc, let's just say, for example, that your code reviewer wants to see it. I don't think they generally do, but there are others that they do. If they wanna see it, it's fussy to get that from Excel into your drawings. You can convert it to, there's plug ins. You can pull it in, but then it's a link. You have to remember to update it. If it changes, it's different. You could PDF it. That's it always looks fuzzy. You could just do a dumb a dumb schedule where you you know, details and lines.

They'll all work. They're all kind of annoying, and it's like, it's 2026. Are we seriously doing this right now? So I just like the idea of pulling, calculations like this and that are just simple. You can have them in your model and do them. And then it it kinda all gets into one place. And I think the more you can do that, you're you're reducing them. Sometimes you're flipping back between things and reducing the possibility of, like, breaking links. I my nightmare is, like, I just issued a set, and then I wake up in the middle of the night, and I remember that I forgot to update that one link to that one Excel spreadsheet. So I've done the work, but it's not represented in what just got signed and went out.

Worst thing ever. So, I like that. I I I'd like to know that I can do that. I just like to have that in my mental toolkit of things that I can build for what I need to do, in my models. So, so yeah. Okay. That filled up our time. I appreciate you sticking around. If you have any questions, I don't mind hanging out for a few minutes. But, otherwise, yeah, that's kind of a tour of a few different analysis, fancy stuff that you can start doing in Revit. But, again, you know, like I said at the beginning, the first thing to get good at is making good drawings. And forget what Revit wants. Just do what you gotta do to make good drawings. Get quick. Get comfortable with it.

And that that's probably that's training, and a lot of it is just, I'm an experience in the saddle. In the launch phase sections. Yeah. We will, yeah. I like that idea. Yeah. I like that idea. We will get this posted, when we're at it. I'll I'll check-in with Fine, and and we'll, we'll get this, we'll get these posted. I like the idea of adding it to the work the the workflow video sections. That'd be cool. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And and I'll follow-up with the link to some of the stuff so you can check it out.

Like, I'll send you this so you can check it out and, you know, kinda reverse engineer it, whatever you wanna do. Any any of the other stuff, I might have made. So yeah. Cool. That's it. We've got the bonus session. Boy, it's really early for me when Ryan scheduled that, so I might have to pop in halfway through. We've got a bunch of dogs in the house. So working around the dog schedule is kinda is kinda how we have to have to roll things. So, yeah, thanks a lot, everyone. You're welcome. Appreciate you showing up. And Thank you, Tyler. I love your smart little fun table things. I I didn't realize, like, I saw you I saw you show up the other day, and I was like, what is this?

Yeah. And now I'm like, oh my god. This is, like, so cool because Yeah. I feel like these are just so nice to have in Revit instead of having to do it outside of Revit. You can have a bunch of these on one sheet that you don't even put on your drawings, really. You could do calcs like this, like, really fun. So Yeah. Really cool. Yeah. There's a bunch of cool stuff you can do. There was there was they were asking for with the grease interceptor. I could have done something like this. Oh, was it? Oh, yeah. Well, hey. There you go. Hey, Ryan. Let me, let me tell you. I got some training for you. Yeah.

And with this, like, so for this calc, obviously, you need to include the the coils. I haven't gotten around to figuring out, like, a smart way to do that without it just being annoying and maybe, like, prone to error because I'm thinking, okay. Let's see. We've got the, you know, the the AHU or the RTU. It's got a hydraulic coil in it, and you can make a schedule for those. I mean, it's definitely doable, but I'm always thinking about how do you build something that's not weird and fussy and prone to error. Like, we just want things to be simple. And sometimes just being like, okay. Off from the side, I'm gonna write down, okay, three coil, six, whatever, add them up. You know?

So I think a future live session of this, like, we could all all do some that would be fun. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be cool. Alright. Well, cool. So, John's session is next. Electrical in twelve minutes, eleven minutes. So, yeah. Soon. So I'll hop over. Cool. Yeah. Sounds good. Alright. Thanks again, everyone. See you later, and, see you in a couple minutes.