Mechanical Equipment and shared parameters. How much data is in your equipment?

[KGC]

How much information are you placing inside your mechanical equipment (electrical and plumbing too). Just curious to see if your loading up your AHUs, VAVs, condensors, ERVs, water heaters, chillers, boilers, storage tanks, etc.....

Are you using the data for schedules only or calculating the values for performance and energy information?

Thanks!

[RoseM]

We generally only go as far as placing the necessary information for scheduling. Our firm would love to take the next step and calculate efficiency, performance, etc. (great for LEED!), but we tend to be limited by the scope of the other trades we work with. E.g. if the architect is only fleshing out "typical floors" we don't have enough information to model the building and see how the equipment interacts.

Speaking of- some of our newer engineers are just getting into Revit and equipment modeling. Anyone know a good resource / tutorial to point them towards with some step-by-step examples on how to construct their own HPs, AHUs, split systems, etc? It'd be appreciated.

[KGC]

Thank you!

As far as a guide goes for creating mechanical equipment. I think knowing the best practices for family creation in general are a good starting point. Being able to setup your reference lines and dimensions are crucial for these kinds of families. That and knowing how to setup a type catalog can be helpful.

If someone has a guide though that would be great to see!

[cjseigler]

The attached pdf is a helpful tutorial in creating new equipment. I've referred to it quite frequently even for creating simple equiment that doesn't need the parametric values.

Hope this helps.

[cyriousn]

We are using them for scheduling mechanical equipment, and motor circuit schedules. The only downside is the typical notes that apply on the schedules, they need to be added seperatly as they cannot be placed in the schedule. We are not however using the mechanical and plumbing connectors to do anything with those systems just the electrical connectors being linked to our parameters for the panel schedules.