Room scheduling, occupancy, egress

[patricks]

We're trying to create a life safety sheet for future projects that will show a room schedule with the occupancy type of each room, the area of each room, occupancy type, number of occupants allowed by code, etc.

What we need to have is some kind of formula that will say okay if this room is Assembly occupancy, take the area and divide by 15. If it's a different occupancy, take the area and divide by some other number, etc. Is there a way to do this?

Right now we just have columns for every type of occupancy, so the table ends up showing the number of occupants for each occupancy type, for EVERY room. We thought we might do filled regions to block out the unwanted numbers for each occupancy but apparently a filled region won't obscure a schedule and it's data. We would rather have just one column labled "Occupancy" that would divide the area by the correct number, based on the occupancy assignment of that room.

Anyone know of a way to do this?

[archjake]

Does this work for you?

[patricks]

Yes that is exactly it. How did you get it to display the S.F. per person automatically when you set the occupancy type in the pulldown box?

[patricks]

I'm guessing the table with all the occupancy types is a key schedule? That's something that can just be in the project but not on a sheet. I appreciate that man, I added it to our template, and also added a field to calculate and total up required egress width ;)

[archjake]

Yes that is exactly it. How did you get it to display the S.F. per person automatically when you set the occupancy type in the pulldown box?
Its just a calculated value done in the schedule.

Yes, it is a key schedule and does not have to be on a sheet.
good idea about calculating the required width.

Enjoy!

[kparks140020]

Great question. Excellent answer Jake. I myself have been working on a life safety schedule and adding it to our template. Our office standard is to show a graphical symbol in a life safety plan and now I can do that reflecting data like a room tag.

Thanks guys.

[patricks]

We have a room tag with life safety info on it (occupancy type, SF per person, and number of persons in that room). However we have to manually enter the SF per person info and things like that. Would there be a way to create a tag that links to this schedule info?

[jkrager]

Sorry, I am not posting an answer to anybody's question here, just a word of warning. Be careful when letting the computer calculate code information automatically! I think it is great that the computer can do that for us, I would just be very thorough about making the computer "show its work". Not that anybody would be this oblivious, but just make sure you don't take the computer's word for everything, and don't always hide your formulas.
I am not trying to say don't do it, just posting a friendly reminder... :-)

[patricks]

Yeah, I think for these purposes, we will have to make doubly sure that the area defined by the room tags is following the correct boundaries. If it isn't, we will have to make use of Room Separation lines.

[trent59822]

Great Schedule. Thanks for providing it. I do have one question. What was the formula for Persons equation. I've tried using Area/S.F.PerPerson, but I can only use the Area units. But in your schedule you another units. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[trent59822]

Don't worry. I just figured it out. Thanks again for the schedule. It's pretty amazing what revit can do.

[archjake]

Great Schedule. Thanks for providing it. I do have one question. What was the formula for Persons equation. I've tried using Area/S.F.PerPerson, but I can only use the Area units. But in your schedule you another units. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
You have to get the units consistant. Divide by another square foot.

[cphubb]

To get the numbers to show in the tags as well as the schedule you need to do a little juggling.

First define a shared parameter for every item you want in the tag
Add those to the project parameters
Create a schedule with both the calculated or type parameters generated by the room
Add the shared parameters next to the calculated parameters in the schedule
Manually type the shared number matching the calculated number
Drop the tag in the room and it will populate.

I have an example attached which has the schedule tag and shared parameter file.

[dbaldacchino]

We need either calculated shared parameters or the ability to report calculated parameters from schedules. These wishes have been included in the wishlist forum I believe. These are things that ADT can do (Property set definitions) and we use them extensively to compare program area and actual area in rooms and issue a textual warning accordingly, calculate occupancy based on load and display them in tags etc. Revit should be able to do this, being a BIM package. Hopefully in the coming future, we will get this wish granted

:Puffy:

[efeiss]

Is there a way to always round the "Persons" column up the the higher number rather than just have it round down if the decimal is below .5?

Great schedule! It is lots of help.

[dbaldacchino]

Take a look at this:

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?threadid=35691

[t1.shep]

Sorry, I am not posting an answer to anybody's question here, just a word of warning. Be careful when letting the computer calculate code information automatically! I think it is great that the computer can do that for us, I would just be very thorough about making the computer "show its work". Not that anybody would be this oblivious, but just make sure you don't take the computer's word for everything, and don't always hide your formulas.
I am not trying to say don't do it, just posting a friendly reminder... :-)
Couldn't agree more at the moment.
I'm trying to get the occupancy schedule to total the occupants by floor. If I add the numbers myself, they are not the same as what Revit is showing me. What's going on here? What is Revit doing? The only thing I can think is that I added .5 to the S.F. per Person calculation so that the numbers will round up. Why is Revit not just adding the total value from the column?:banghead::screwy:

[dbaldacchino]

Actually what you need to do is make your occupancy calculated parameter set as an integer, which will automatically round up to the next whole number. When you add totals, you will not have rounding errors as there are no fractions in integers. So create a calculated parameter, set it as integer and type the following formula:

(Area / OLF) / 1 SF

where OLF is a number or integer parameter (Occupancy Load Factor). You need to divide by 1 SF (or whatever area units you're using) to zero out the units and prevent the "Inconsistent Units" error.

[mthurnauer]

I have to say that I don't completely agree with the rounding up method that has been suggested in this and other threads. Uses such as business are calculated gross. You would take the entire building area and its subsequent accessory use spaces and divide the total by 100 and THEN round up to the nearest whole number. By rounding up each and every space to the next whole number and then adding them, you are actually increasing the total occupant load. Now for egress this is fine as a little extra safety factor is no big deal and we should not be designing egress to be exactly the minimum anyway, but when it comes to calculating the required plumbing fixture counts, this slight increase in occupancy can be a real headache. For my schedule, I don't round up until calculating totals. also, I have a column to indicate if the use is calculated using net since some spaces such as assembly with fixed seating may be an actual count.

[dbaldacchino]

For business areas, you have to look at the entire area as you said and not space by space. In that case I would manually show the occupancy of that area rather than space by space. Hmmmm this really sounds like something that would lend itself well to the new space object in RMEP.

[t1.shep]

Actually what you need to do is make your occupancy calculated parameter set as an integer, which will automatically round up to the next whole number. When you add totals, you will not have rounding errors as there are no fractions in integers. So create a calculated parameter, set it as integer and type the following formula:

(Area / OLF) / 1 SF

where OLF is a number or integer parameter (Occupancy Load Factor). You need to divide by 1 SF (or whatever area units you're using) to zero out the units and prevent the "Inconsistent Units" error.

Here's what I have in my formula for calculating the number of occupants...
((Area / S.F. PerPerson) + .5 SF) / 1'^2

Are you saying that I need to make another field that just calculates the total, without the .5 SF added? Won't that fail to add together the rooms that would round down to 0 (that I want to round up to 1)?

Sorry, took a look at my entire calculated value settings and saw that it was set to number. Made a new calculated parameter and set its type to integer and it seems to be adding as I like.

[jtobin.68416]

For business areas, you have to look at the entire area as you said and not space by space. In that case I would manually show the occupancy of that area rather than space by space. Hmmmm this really sounds like something that would lend itself well to the new space object in RMEP.

Actually, we've been doing Life Safety plans for quite a while now, and we do them with Area Plans.
It gives a lot more flexibility than rooms for gross areas, etc.

It may seem like a needless duplication, but for certain building types like dormitories are all gross areas, so it can be really quick.
We then just net out the assembly areas, and classrooms.

Also we create an OLF parameter that is already an 'Area' parameter type to avoid all that 1^2 math.
We also add the .5 to our formula, because rounding down is never allowed anyway.

Lastly we have a 'dummy' tag value that gets used in the actual Area tag.
It allows us to handle spaces that used ‘fixed seating’ numbers, and not areas.

John Tobin

[dbaldacchino]

Here's what I have in my formula for calculating the number of occupants...
((Area / S.F. PerPerson) + .5 SF) / 1'^2

Are you saying that I need to make another field that just calculates the total, without the .5 SF added? Won't that fail to add together the rooms that would round down to 0 (that I want to round up to 1)?

Sorry, took a look at my entire calculated value settings and saw that it was set to number. Made a new calculated parameter and set its type to integer and it seems to be adding as I like.

The above formula I typed in is for an integer parameter. It will not round down but up to the next whole integer. When making calculations for life safety, you always round up anyway.

[ppaige]

I was looking over the Occupancy Schedule and there's one thing that concerns me - there doesn't seem to be any use of the "Gross" and "Net" fields. That is, when it calculates the Persons in a room, it uses the Revit room area, which is always Net. This would mean that occupancies like Business, which are Gross, are always miscalculated.

Am I seeing this right or missing something?

[patricks]

Yep that's how it works. But how would you really calculate the Gross area of individual rooms for the purpose of egress calculations? I guess you really should measure to the centerline of walls, and to do that you would need to do an area plan with area separation lines along the walls. I'm not really sure how corridors and bathrooms should be handled, especially when you have a mixed-use building.

[jtobin.68416]

Corridors and bathrooms *are* part of the gross, that's why we use Area Plans and not rooms for our Life Safety Plan as I mentioned above. You need to be able to aggregate smaller areas into one large gross area for the code calc.


I was looking over the Occupancy Schedule and there's one thing that concerns me - there doesn't seem to be any use of the "Gross" and "Net" fields. That is, when it calculates the Persons in a room, it uses the Revit room area, which is always Net. This would mean that occupancies like Business, which are Gross, are always miscalculated.


Check your definition for Gross Area in your local code - usually it's anything measured from the inside face of exterior walls and fire walls, and it's for the *building*, not rooms. So room-by-room analysis can get really tedious. Usually you 'Net out' any areas that need to be Net, (like Assembly spaces) and this reduces the Gross accordingly.

John Tobin

[thillhouse]

Corridors and bathrooms *are* part of the gross, that's why we use Area Plans and not rooms for our Life Safety Plan as I mentioned above. You need to be able to aggregate smaller areas into one large gross area for the code calc.

Check your definition for Gross Area in your local code - usually it's anything measured from the inside face of exterior walls and fire walls, and it's for the *building*, not rooms. So room-by-room analysis can get really tedious. Usually you 'Net out' any areas that need to be Net, (like Assembly spaces) and this reduces the Gross accordingly.

John Tobin

John, do you create areas based on each occupancy? Is there an easy way to distinguish this? I keep running into Area Styles and Area types.
Do I understand this correctly?
- Area type is used to determine if it is a Gross or Net calculation?
- Area style is just a number...what can this be used for?
I'm kind of confused as you can tell...
Would you mind giving a step by step for a simple plan and schedule?

Thanks
Tim

[mcox.157847]

At least it would be nice to be able to define a shared parameter based on a key style schedule. Then one could assign a Occupancy Function Code to a Key schedule, and the key schedule could assign a value to a shared parameter with in the schedule.

Otherwise you are stuck putting in a duplicate column in the schedule to replicate information.

[dbaldacchino]

Just realised I made a mistake on my previous post....Integers use "Banker's rounding", meaning that 3.49 rounds to 3. This is not what we want, so the suggested formula really needs to be ((Area / OLF) + 0.49 SF) / 1 SF. This will always round up properly. See the following for more insight:

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=4899

Thanks to Steven Campbell for the link!

[jtobin.68416]

John, do you create areas based on each occupancy? Is there an easy way to distinguish this? I keep running into Area Styles and Area types.
Do I understand this correctly?
- Area type is used to determine if it is a Gross or Net calculation?
- Area style is just a number...what can this be used for?
I'm kind of confused as you can tell...
Would you mind giving a step by step for a simple plan and schedule?

Thanks
Tim

Tim,

Sorry didn't see your post till now. Somehow this slipped through my radar.

We create areas based on USE, as most codes assign people loads by USE not OCCUPANCY.

I got the biggest tip from this very forum a couple of years ago. Someone posted a key schedule with the use classifications. I believe it was for ROOMS. I’ll see if I can find the post. We decided that Area Plans were more suitable for us because so many buildings are calculated by Gross, so I recreated it as an AREA key schedule. The trick was to create the values as an Area value, so when you do the ‘calculated value’, the math is easy.

When you say Area Style, do you mean Area Scheme? The Area Scheme is just a housekeeping issue for me really. It helps to keep your Life Safety plans separate from, say, your other gross area calcs. In the view browser you’ll see the Area Scheme name in parentheses after the view name.

I’ve attached a file with our key schedule on it – giving back to the forum that gave to me! Basically you create areas and then use the key schedule to assign the Use, and see the numbers change.

John Tobin

[sblackburn]

John - thanks for sharing that info and the Revit files. I've set up areas plans with the schedule and schedule key, but I was wondering one thing - you mentioned in a previous post in this thread that you used a 'dummy' tag value that gets used in the actual Area tag to handle spaces that used ‘fixed seating’ numbers, and not areas. Any chance you could post that tag, or let me know how you change it? Also - how then do you get the calculation for that "fixed seating" area in the schedule to add its load to the total occupancy load? Is there a way to have a row with a manual input? Thanks for the help!

Steve Blackburn
MPA Architects, Inc.

[patricks]

Also - how then do you get the calculation for that "fixed seating" area in the schedule to add its load to the total occupancy load? Is there a way to have a row with a manual input? Thanks for the help!

Steve Blackburn
MPA Architects, Inc.

This is what I'm running into right now. I'm trying to get a field for fixed seating numbers that will calculate into my egress width field. If there is no entry in either the calculated occupant load or the manual input field, the formula breaks and nothing will show up for my egress width.

[Slocum]

great schedule, I am unsure how to inset it into my existing drawing, can you please help?

[patricks]

great schedule, I am unsure how to inset it into my existing drawing, can you please help?

Very easy in the current and recent versions, not so much in the older versions when this thread began. :lol:

Insert > Insert From File > Insert View From File. Pick the file attached at the beginning of this post, and then you can insert schedules and key schedules into another project (preferably your template).

[richardarchitect]

ok, here is what I want to create. I did this in ACAD, now I need to figure it out in Revit. I can't seem to do screenshots, so I have to do it as an attachment.

I have spent a week at this, and am totally lost.

the occupancy symbols i want to create as room tags ON MY LIFE SAFETY SHEETS ONLY!!!!!!!!!!!

maybe I am dreaming, but I think this is possible.

[nicesave2000]

For business areas, you have to look at the entire area as you said and not space by space. In that case I would manually show the occupancy of that area rather than space by space. Hmmmm this really sounds like something that would lend itself well to the new space object in RMEP.
Is there any place where I can get a generic electrical symbol template? My haiku: On my way to get gas, I passed it.

[dbaldacchino]

ok, here is what I want to create.....

Just create the room tag you would like with the info you want to display and on the Life-Safety view, use that tag instead. This should be straight-forward.

As to the other question, please post in the appropriate forum and refrain from changing thread subjects. Thanks!

[richardarchitect]

As to the other question, please post in the appropriate forum and refrain from changing thread subjects. Thanks!

After reviewing all my comments in this thread, I fail to see where I have "changed the thread subject". Please enlighten me Thanks!

[cganiere]

For plumbing fixtures we calculate them separate from exiting. We use the number of persons based on the actual use of the spaces.


I have to say that I don't completely agree with the rounding up method that has been suggested in this and other threads. Uses such as business are calculated gross. You would take the entire building area and its subsequent accessory use spaces and divide the total by 100 and THEN round up to the nearest whole number. By rounding up each and every space to the next whole number and then adding them, you are actually increasing the total occupant load. Now for egress this is fine as a little extra safety factor is no big deal and we should not be designing egress to be exactly the minimum anyway, but when it comes to calculating the required plumbing fixture counts, this slight increase in occupancy can be a real headache. For my schedule, I don't round up until calculating totals. also, I have a column to indicate if the use is calculated using net since some spaces such as assembly with fixed seating may be an actual count.

[dbaldacchino]

After reviewing all my comments in this thread, I fail to see where I have "changed the thread subject". Please enlighten me Thanks!

Richard, I was talking about the post after yours :)

[richardarchitect]

Richard, I was talking about the post after yours :)

Ooops, my mistake.

I got my Life safety plans working, tho I fear not in the most Revit-like way. I'm working now on figuring out best to post the info. Yes, it is fairly straightforward to make the tag and the schedules, especially using key schedules, but in order to make tags from the calculated values in the schedule, I find I am basically forced to create shared parameters similar to my calculated value, then manually enter the calculated values into a shared parameter field in the schedule. This is prone to errors, and does not update itself if I move walls, for example. I've read every forum I can find on the subject and have yet to find a workaround for this.

I'm including my area and room life safety schedules in the form of a sheet PDF, and my tag families ( I used 1 for areas and 1 for rooms). The 3rd Floor Life Safety Area Scedule does not have the shared parameters filled in to make it clear exactly what columns I have to fill in manually. As most Function of Space types in the IBC use gross areas to calculate occupant load, I expect to use mainly areas plans for my Life Safety Plans, with specific rooms (such as Assembly with Fixed Seating, for example) tagged with a room tag. I wouldn't actually place all these fields on a sheet, however I left all the columns unhidden for this illustration.

I'm using line types to show fire-rated partitions. I experimented with using coarse fill hatching, but it doesn't work well with short walls, as I need to show doors on my Life Safety Plans, and I like to use coarse fill hatching for other purposes. Again, this doesn't update manually if I move walls (sigh).

I'd certainly be open to any suggestions as to how to further automate (improve) this approach. This is my 1st attempt to document a project using Revit, and it's turning out to be much more difficult than I expected.

[richardarchitect]

As regards my above post, I thought it would be useful to also post a PDF containing my key schedules, along with a .rvt file of an area schedule.

[dbaldacchino]

As you pointed out, this is a manual process and there's no way around it, short of an API tool that takes the value of a calculated schedule parameter and copy it automatically to a shared parameter which you can then use in a tag. This was the first problem I came across when I started using Revit in 2005/2006 and as you can see, nothing has been done about it!

If you want to do it "the right way", you have to do a combination of Area plans and regular plans to calculate occupancy. Some rooms you'll use a room schedule to calculate the occupancy while others you'll use the area plans and area schedules for gross areas (ex: business areas). It also boils down to how you document the fire-safety plan (or life safety or code review...whatever name you like to use!). At my previous employer, we used to show occupancy in every space, probably due to project type (schools). Currently, we just show total building occupancy and show that we have enough exists and exit widths, so there's really not much to do and not a whole lot to worry about in documenting.

As to wall fire rating, we currently use filters and hatches. It is problematic in short and thin walls, and also in curved walls since the orientation of the pattern does not follow a radial orientation. But at least it's as parametric as we can get. Overlaying lines/detail components to get a "fire-tape" is not my preference although sometimes that is the most straight-forward and easiest approach. We've done it that way for years right? :) Sometimes you gotta throw out "BIM" and get paid...at least until the software catches up and provides us with a proper way to do this.

[cdatechguy]

I was looking for where Richard changed the title as well.... :roll:

[richardarchitect]

Thanks Dave, and everyone else, I've learned a lot over the past couple weeks from this thread. I guess I'm kinda where you were back in 2004, 2005 Dave, and I'm determined to make my best effort not to develop bad habits as I teach myself Revit, so I may ask what seem to be naive questions.

I posted what I have come up with for validation, I guess, that I was using at least a reasonable approach to the solution. A look at my 2 recent posts will show that I did indeed create both Room and Area Schedules and Tags, so I have both covered. The particular project I am working on at present is 10 stories, approx. 40,000 sq ft per floor, with mercantile occupancy on the 1st 2 floors, and business occupancy on floors 3 -10, so I will be using mainly Area Plans, schedules and tags. If I need to have, say, an aditorium with over 100 seats - fixed seating I can always create a seperate area for it.

This building is basically a 300' diameter round building with 4 wings (lots of curved walls), which is why I chose to use linetypes instead of hatch for the fire-rated walls in plan for this project, although I have created the hatches and fire-rated wall types to use hatching.

Let's hope sometime in the near future the Revit gods figure out a way to get calculated values into tags. I'm running into the same thing when I am totaling the segments of an egress path. Sure, I can total up the length using calculate totals, but then I have to manually enter the total into a shared parameter to make a tag for the total path length. Revit touts that it is parameter/data-based, but I am becoming quite disillusioned with its present handling of this information.

[dbaldacchino]

I suppose if we did color plots, we could use colors with filters just fine on walls :) But color plots are the exception, not the norm. As to deciding whether to bother with a room schedule strategy or Areas, it really depends on how many parts of your building require occupancy calculations with gross areas. If you have a few gross areas and mostly net, then you use both rooms and areas but if you're doing mostly areas, you could just stick with areas only and sketch area boundaries around those rooms requiring net calculations.

Copying parameters is a disgusting workaround and there's no end in sight for this problem in Revit (again, except through the API). Which to me, is not acceptable for something so essential to our profession. We should be able to do calculated values and display them in tags.

[richardarchitect]

Yeah, and while they're at it, allow me to align annotation tags with the element they're associated with. They look like **** as either horizontal or vertical when the element is at an angle or curved. I tend to do a lot of curved buildings................

[dbaldacchino]

You can :) See attached.

[richardarchitect]

Yes, that works fine for "system family" type element such as walls, rooms, doors, windows. However, I am using generic model elements for my egress paths (the egress path provided by Steve Stafford in his Revit Op Ed blog). The generic family has an option to rotate with element, as does the Generic Model Tag. However, when I insert the tag the only options are vertical or horizontal. Maybe I'm missing something, but I've tried everything that I can think of.

[dbaldacchino]

That appears to be a bug as the "Rotate with component" does not seem to have any effect. When it's enabled, the orientation doesn't even work. I would file a Support Request with Autodesk (I'm sure it's been reported before but helps to bump it up a notch). It could be a problem with line-based families or with generic model tags, or both!

In the meantime what you might consider is to nest generic annotation in the family itself and connect it to the length of the line-based family. This way you won't need to tag anything and you'll be able to have it orient in relation to the line itself.

[richardarchitect]

good idea Dave, I'll give that a shot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[patricks]

Wow it's great to see this thread still going 5 years after I created it, and generating lots of helpful and insightful ideas.

Something I did for our occupancy tabulation schedule (which is still just a room schedule at this time) is to add a field to the Schedule Key for Assembly w/ Fixed Seats, which has an occupancy/SF of 0. Then I added a Room field for fixed seating occupant load. Then I added another field that calculates room occupancy based on an If statement. If the SF per occupant is greater than 0, then it calculates the occupancy based on room area. Otherwise it uses the fixed seating occupant load number. Works great in the schedule for things like auditoriums or classrooms with a fixed number of seats.

However we also do area plans for Gross occupancy calcs, I just haven't really set up a schedule key and everything for that just yet. My question is - when you have a building with occupancy calculated by Gross area, and then you have an auditorium in there that needs a net calculation, where do you place your area boundary lines in the Area Plan for the gross area calculation? Do you place the boundary line on the inside faces of the net area, so that the gross area goes right up to the boundary of the net area?

My other question - is there a way to get a single schedule to report both your gross and net occupant calcs from both an area plan and a room schedule? How do others deal with this? Just show 2 separate schedules and have a dumb piece of text somewhere in which you add the totals together from the 2 schedules?

[dbaldacchino]

Wow it's great to see this thread still going 5 years after I created it, and generating lots of helpful and insightful ideas.

Great indeed. The fact that Revit hasn't improved since then on this very important aspect of our work...not so great :screwy:



...However we also do area plans for Gross occupancy calcs, I just haven't really set up a schedule key and everything for that just yet. My question is - when you have a building with occupancy calculated by Gross area, and then you have an auditorium in there that needs a net calculation, where do you place your area boundary lines in the Area Plan for the gross area calculation? Do you place the boundary line on the inside faces of the net area, so that the gross area goes right up to the boundary of the net area?

I think it would be ok to do it to the center-line of wall, but to be safe I would go to the outside face. You probably will only increase the occupancy by a couple of occupants which shouldn't be a big deal. I like your approach to the occupancy of fixed seating spaces. Another simple approach if you're manually copying calculated occupancy numbers so they appear in schedules is to simply type in the fixed seating number and total that column instead of the calculated one.



My other question - is there a way to get a single schedule to report both your gross and net occupant calcs from both an area plan and a room schedule? How do others deal with this? Just show 2 separate schedules and have a dumb piece of text somewhere in which you add the totals together from the 2 schedules?

I don't think there is by using Revit schedules. Multi-category schedules only let you see parameters in Rooms (and not even the area of a room) and do not access parameters for Areas. So they have to be separate schedules. This is mostly still a manual process of adding totals from different schedules. Revit needs to have some mechanism that lets us designate whether occupancy is to be calculated based on room area (net) or by gross (a GREAT potential use for Spaces!) and ultimately letting us total them in one schedule. Let's see if in 5 more years we're still coming back to this posts and :banghead:

[patricks]

Yeah we'll see. :roll:

The reason I did the fixed seating parameter the way I did is so that the room schedule will show both area calc'd occupancy and fixed seating occupancy in a single column, and that single column gets totaled up. Looks much better than having occupancy numbers in multiple columns for different rooms.

I suppose one approach if you only have one or a few Net occupancy areas is to include areas for those spaces in your area plan. Then you could in fact have it all in one schedule.

[dbaldacchino]

Yeah but then you have to chase a bunch of area boundary lines if walls move. Can be done obviously if you're after a one-schedule approach. Historically, we used to show occupants per space in a room tag and not include a schedule on the drawings. Then in the code review notes we would include the total and show we have enough exits, egress widths etc. with notes around the plan. At this firm, we show the capacity of each exit via a tag and include the total building occupant load to show we have enough egress width (and show the longest travel distance route).

[patricks]

Back at it again, dealing with a similar issue that I state above with gross area calc's with net occupancy areas inside them.

My current project is a building on a college campus, so the whole building is Group B occupancy, with business areas calculated at 100 sf/person. However inside that building are several large computer classrooms that will have a fixed number of occupants based on the number of computer stations in the room, most of them 40 students.

Going by the 100 sf/person calculation, only about 12-13 people are allowed in the rooms. However IBC does state that occupancy calcs are a minimum number, and the occupancy can be higher if the egress system is designed for it. It also states that A-3 assembly areas with 50 or less people are counted as Group B. So the whole building is Group B (no mixed occupancy, and yes I know Ch. 3 Occupancy Classification is different than Ch. 10 Occupant Load, which confuses many people I think).

So what I did was create an area schedule and area schedule key that replicates the room schedule key attached back near my original post in this thread. I made an area plan, and sketched the area boundary lines, since even the automatic lines don't give you the correct area (you don't want to figure to center line of wall at windows). Then I traced around the inside of the classrooms. I assigned an area to the whole building less the classrooms, and then to each classroom. The building area has the 100 sf/person calculation, while the classrooms have the fixed seating calculation.

So that whole thing gives the correct number of occupants for the building, I think, but my boss said those areas still aren't technically "Assembly" areas. I just used that because there is a fixed number of computer stations. My boss thinks the whole building should be calculated at 100 sf/person, with an ADDITIONAL occupant load for those rooms. So a classroom might have 13 people at 100 sf/person, with an additional 27 people to get it to the total number of 40 computer stations.

I'd like to show this in one schedule, but I'm not seeing how it would be possible. I need to have 2 different building areas to overlap (whole building plus each large classroom).

Thoughts?

[patricks]

For now what I have done is added a line to the Area key schedule, called "Increased Occupant Load" set to 0 sf/person, same as the Assembly Fixed Seating line. In my schedule, under the column I have that would normally display Gross or Net, that area function says "see Section 1004.2" which is the section in the code about increased occupant load.

So I still have to calculate the Gross area of the building for Business areas as separate from these classroom areas, but the total number is still correct, I think.

[aaronrumple]

I said screw it and wrote a .Net app to deal with the whole thing. ;-)

And I don't think your boss has the calc. right. Shouldn't the computer labs be calc'ed at Educational - Classroom (20 sf?) It is movable workstations and chairs right?

Each area should be calc'ed for it use. The only place you would have an additive load is if you have an accessory space exiting through another. For instance - office dumping into an open office area and the egressing out into a corridor. The doorto the corridor has to meet the combined load. But each space has its own defined load.

[dbaldacchino]

I concur with Aaron. Just because the building occupancy classification is Business, I don't think you can just use the 100sf/person calc. for everything. The code official might just tell you that those areas are Assembly and you'll have to use 15sf/person for unconcentrated tables and chairs. So using the classroom number is actually better. When doing schools, it didn't matter that a class would not have more than a certain number of students; for egress calcs, we still calculated based on potential maximum occupancy.

[patricks]

This building (on a college campus) consists of mostly department offices, thus the whole building being considered Business areas at 100 sf/person gross (including all hallways, bathrooms, stairs, elevator shafts, etc).

The rooms in question are designed for the MAX number of computer desks and chairs that will fit in the room. There could never be any more than that number and still maintain ADA access. That's why I'm calculating those rooms with the increased occupant load over what I would get from applying the 100 sf/person.

Even if I did use Classrooms at 20 sf/person, there's still the question of those spaces being a Net calculation vs. the rest of the building as a Gross SF calculation.

[brantfetter]

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This is a great thread, but a lot has changed. In case anyone is trying to solve the whole problem about putting the calculated occupancy load in a room tag and found this in their search (like I have), many of the work-arounds are now unnecessary. See the new feature in the 2017 version of Revit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P253SSMT2wE
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