Can anyone confirm my suspicions?

[MikeJarosz]

I am building a sliding prison cell door family. I want it to be detailed enough to look good in all details and drawings, so I am making the max out of detail levels and appears-in views. I'm satisfied with the results so far, but I've had to use a huge number if reference planes. This family will go into a multistory urban detention center and will have many instances.

My suspicion is that reference planes inside families don't really add any significant weight to the project file, but I don't know that for certain.

Can anyone confirm this?

[cdatechguy]

Not sure...I try to hide some reference planes in my sketch views whenever possible....

How large is your family? Ours is under 2mb....but has 8 different door types loaded in with it...

[mthurnauer]

I would not think so, but be sure that you select reference planes that you do not want to be able to snap to once placed in the project and make them Not a Reference. If you don't make this change then you will find that you have lots of undesirable snapping results.

[josh.made4worship]

I would definitely take heed to mthurnaur's post about setting them to "Not a Reference" if there are a lot of them. I don't think it will make your family much "bigger" or even slower, unless you have unnecessary snapping to the family.