Piping System size

[neightyeight]

This topic has been discussed before on this forum - keeping a piping system in Revit small for speed. My question is how do you all go about that? From what I see, there are a few way to go about it:

1) Simply leave an open end on a small portion of the system (ie. bathroom group), the pipe then going to the mains (but not actually connected to the group) would need to have the "Additional Flow" parameter set to be identical to the total for the group.

2) Create different piping systems for portions of the building - CW for enlarged plans, CW for mains, CW for Mechancal room. The flow would not propagate though and would need to be set similar to above.

3) Create a Mechanical equipment family containing connectors to allow pipe to connect in, then a connector for flow to go out. Again, you would have to manually match the flow rate, this time through a parameter in the family.

All of these approaches have their drawbacks and there's part of me that wants a nice, completely connected system. There's a bigger part of me that wants Revit to respond more quickly when editing pipes. So what is the solution? Or at least, what have you found that works best? Thanks for the input.

[jlondenberg]

I don't think that this is still much of an issue in RMEP 2012 and 2013. You'll likely waste as much time working around as you will gain from broken up systems.

If you're not going to keep the whole system connected and parametrically tagged, then why not just turn off all the flow calculations?

Personally I leave everything on the default systems, fully connected, fully parametrically taggable with flow. Then as needed for ongoing documentation, I create separate systems for each need. I recently wrote an AUGI World article describing some of this.

[neightyeight]

Thanks for the input. So far I've been following the same process that you describe - usually with flow calculations turned off to speed things up until I want to size stuff at which point I turn them on. Is there anything you do that speeds up the editing process as I've found the software develops some lag when the piping system gets large?

BTW: Nice article. I read it back in January too.

[jlondenberg]

Slow is just slow...the technique I use to deal with this is to repeated bash my forehead against the wall beside my desk.

No really, good hardware is one benefit - good summary here

If you get to the point where you can't stand the lack of speed, I'd suggest separating and linking different disciplines/scopes. For instance, for mech piping, keep the equipment and ductwork in an entirely separate model, link this in to a piping model and copy monitor the equipment. This is obviously complicated to keep straight so use with caution. Others have suggested keeping the disciplines together and separating the building by floor/wing, but that loses the parametrically connect benefits.

Your mileage may vary, so make a separate copy of your project and experiment with these options before committing your working file.