Need a room to show up twice in a Schedule.

[archjake]

Here is an odd one, but something I need.

We are working on a project where two mechanical units supply air to one room. For an Outside Air Calculation (bring fresh air into the building) I need the room to show up in two different zones. I'm not sure of an easy way to do this except for one of the following:

Create a dummy room in blank space w/ separation lines

Or

Perhaps the more sensible approach is to split my schedule up into multiple and then each schedule would be filtered by different parameters. Seems a bit messy.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this, or how Systems may be handling this, or will handle it in the future?

[dbaldacchino]

I think I'd go for the secind option....I'd rather create an additional report than create a duplicate "fake" model element. It's just a matter of principle I guess :)

The problem is that if you were creating schedules and filtering by the first letter of the room number (for instance to filter for area A or B etc), you cannot use this approach. You'll have to perhaps use the comments field and type A in rooms for area A, etc. and type "A, B, C, D" etc. for the room that you want to include in all the schedules. Then filter for the comments field To Contain "A", "B", etc. and that special room will appear multiple times.

[gbrowne]

Second option with a specific parameter for the item, surely?

[archjake]

Update: I went with the 2nd option. A few issues I had was that I needed the room to have the area split in half. So I put in a calculated filed with an if statement that only split the room with the specific square footage in half.

If I would have split the room from the start all my other room schedules would have shown 2 rooms when it was in reality one except for this one issue.

Then I found that I had another parameter that I had to duplicate because it had different values for each half of the room, and then I had to adjust the formula fields appropriately. A bit more work than just using my schedule from my template, but I got it to work.

There are work arounds to most issues... We just have to be creative.

I think asking the question helped me formulate the more "correct" approach to this problem in the first place. Thanks Augi.

[dbaldacchino]

Jake, could you have also split the room in half instead? I mean, if the room was 1000SF, couldn't you have created 2 spaces @ 500SF each and in plan only tag one of the spaces? That way the area is split for you and there's no need for formulas to do that. Then use area separation lines in plan.

[robert.manna]

Jake, if I understand your original post correctly, you had two spaces that in reality are one space, but for mech reasons, you need to treat the one space as two? In any case the question that has been bugging me is kind of the opposite, but since you opened the floor re: Revit Systems, I'm going to push forward.

What happens when you have lets say a large lobby space. The client wants to understand this space as seperate disctinct rooms or areas that meet different functional requirements, for example, recepetion desk, waiting area, elevator lobby, security zone, cafe, etc..... Typically in RB I would create rooms for each (makes sense, I think). However, now my MEP engineer comes along, and all they really care about is the fact that this "lobby" is one giant space, and they need to heat it, cool it, etc... and they want to understand the space as one giant load. What then? If they copy/monitor my rooms, they'll get all the small spaces. If I make my "rooms" into areas, now I can't schedule everything in one schedule on the arch side. I don't have a good answer to this situation, and it is potentially very real. The best example I can think of is the GSA, where they do require you to break up large spaces like a lobby into seperate rooms for their custom software to review the programatic area. So in this case areas are quite possibly not a viable solution, it needs to be rooms. Can the guys on RS be selective about what rooms they copy/monitor, and then they could create a single room entity for the lobby space in their model? As I said I don't know, I'm curious to see if this post ilicits any discussion.

-R

[dbaldacchino]

Very interesting and real point. This is extremely common and not a rarity, especially in office suites, reception areas, libraries, etc. I wonder if there's a "merge rooms" command of sorts for the sake of calculations. I mean, all that Systems should care about is what spaces make up a zone, right? My guess is that it already works that way but am not sure.

[kpaxton]

Hmmm - I wonder if we could make a request... that Rooms be able to have sub-rooms.... kind of like the standard Parent-Child hierarchy that is prevalent in other aspects of this and other software.

Room1p = Room1ca + Room1cb + Room1cc + etc...

where
p = "parent" definition (the default room definition if no children)
ca = child "a" portion defintion
cb = child "b" portion definition

whoa,
Kyle

[UpNorth]

We are starting to work with Revit Systems (in a full-service firm) and that does bring up a good point. One solution (if this does not already work) would be for Revit Systems to ignore the "room Separation" lines and just look at the primary room bounding elements (including the irregular shaped ceiling:)

[robert.manna]

We are starting to work with Revit Systems (in a full-service firm) and that does bring up a good point. One solution (if this does not already work) would be for Revit Systems to ignore the "room Separation" lines and just look at the primary room bounding elements (including the irregular shaped ceiling:)
Well, I'm 99% sure there is no option to tell it to ignore room bounding lines. Though you can make walls non-bounding. Making seperation lines non-bounding would kinda defeat the point.

The idea of sub-rooms occured to me, however I didn't want to suggust any ideas, just open the floor to discussion. It seems that would be the easiest approach, because it would also resolve some area scheduling conflicts you could get into, where sometimes you might need the aggregate area of the whole space (Im thinking code here), but then your client wants to understand it as "sub spaces".

-R

[archjake]

I think this brings up a very interesting conversation. I agree with Kyle that the solution may lie in sub rooms. Its a very logical solution, but I'm not sure how this would interact with rooms without sub-rooms. It could be that you could set a schedule to display main rooms, or main rooms and sub rooms. Seems simple enough. And adding onto Roberts discussion about the engineer needing some sub-rooms and others as just main rooms. Seems Like an interesting problem that could use some studying. I think the engineer in systems can always not copy monitor our rooms and create his own based on his needs. This is a good case for linked models rather than disciplines working in the same model with worksets.

As for my problem I didn't create two rooms because that would mean that I would have two rooms listed on all my schedules by room. I have 6 or so that this would cause a problem with. Occupancy, Finish Schedule, etc. So for me it was easier to write a formula into my mechanical OSA Schedule(s).

I hope to see more discussion on this topic as I feel that it is an important one. After all rooms as objects have only been around for a version or two. It could use some refinement.