Wires/circuiting has gotten no love from the Revit development team over the years.

[Wish List System]

Summary: Better Wiring Control

Description: Wires/circuiting has gotten no love from the Revit development team over the years.
• There's no control over the size of the home-run arrows (or ability to swap it out for a different Generic Annotation Family like you can with Wire Ticks).

• There's no control over quantity of home-run arrows (we'd rather just show one, and use the wire tag to show the quantity of circuits).

• There's no control over placement of the wire-ticks on the wire.

• There's only "chamfered", "spline" and "arc" for wires (in your use case, it would be nice to have something like AutoCAD's polyline so you can use orthagonal wires).

• If your wire is in a design option, multi-circuit home runs behave strangely. (this was in Revit 2012, haven't checked in a while).

• If your wire is in a design option, wire-gapping ceases to function (this was in Revit 2012, haven't checked in a while).

• Circuiting: There's no way to circuit equipment from a design option, to an electrical panel in the main model (only work around is to make sure you circuit the device/equipment FIRST before you move it into a design option.

• Circuiting: There's no way to manually adjust the sizes of the wires and quantity of runs (Using the NEC tables is great for automatically sizing, but sometimes the designer would like to add a spare neutral or a couple extra runs for an anticipated future service).

• Circuiting: There's no way to do DC distribution systems in the model. A single phase panel will ALWAYS show both an A and B bus --- so you can't create 24VDC or 48VDC distribution systems for say server equipment or fire alarm systems (how nice would it be to do your Fire Alarm voltage drop calcs in Revit? Or see if your 70V speaker system amp has enough oomph to power your long runs of speakers).

• If you have multiple circuits on an electrical device, the "Circuit Number" tag will ONLY show the circuit associated with the "Primary Connector" in the Revit family. The only way to get aroudn this is to create a wire out of EACH electrical connector and tag that wire. Looks goofy if you're doing a bunch of circuits off one junction box.

• Multi-section panelboards are unsupported (you can't do main lug to main lug commections between panels WITHOUT a breaker).

• Relay panels are unsupported in Revit. You can't, for example use an Electrical Panel family, and have a single feeder circuit (from an upstream panel) associated with multiple output circuits (as you commonly find in Relay Panels without a single pointsof connection).

• If your device needs to change from say, 120VAC single phase (1H 1N) to a 208VAC single phase (2H, 1N) device --- you have to disconnect the circuit entirely. Change the voltage. And recircuit. It would be much nicer if you could just go to your panel schedule, bump a couple circuits out of the way, and change the voltage and quantities of hot conductors on the circuit.

• You cannot associate wires (circuits) with runs of conduit like you can associate air/liquid with Ducts/Pipes. Benttley Electrical Systems can do this. (which is an absolute rubbish product in my opinion, but this is the only interesting feature it has over Revit MEP).

• You can't associate a Lighting Device (switch) with MULTIPLE switch systems. Sof you have a double-gang light switch with two toggles on it... you can't add that switch to both the "A" light circuits and "B" light circuits in your space.

• I am sure there are more that I'm missing --- the point being, if you're doing an electrical design in Revit MEP, be prepared to develop a lot of work-arounds and procedures to get around Revit MEP's short-comings.



Product and Feature: Revit MEP - MEP Electrical Wiring - (Electrical)

Submitted By: John Yonemori-Antal on 10/22/2014

[jmkerfoot772656]

100% Agreed! Electrical needs more attention by the autodesk developers!

Just to name a few more issues:

• The SubFeed Lugs, MCB Rating and Mains parameters in electrical equipment are all setup backwards (Type vs Instance) and require users to create their own parameters... but the built-in parameters can't be re-grouped elsewhere or hidden to avoid confusion because they're built-ins.

• Panel Schedule customization features are extremely limited.

• There is no built-in functionality for implementing SubFeed Lugs for circuits besides creating a parameter called "Max #1 Pole Breakers (Fake)" with a formula of "= Max #1 Pole Breakers - 6", linking your fake parameter into the panel schedule, and artificially adding 6 to all your Max #1 Pole Breakers parameters for electrical equipment with SubFeed panels. Unfortunately, you then have to switch out the template every time you want to see the subfeed circuits, and if you don't check it regularly on every single panel, other circuits will pile up there and just go missing.

• For some weird reason, the 'Equipment Switch' equipment type for electrical equipment families does not contain a 'Panel Name' parameter... a parameter that EVERY OTHER EQUIPMENT TYPE HAS!!! So Equipment switch is basically useless to us because we can't use them as named taps, enclosed CBs or disconnects.

• There's no way to build PDU families, or any other type of integrated electrical equipment that isn't basic and does more than one thing.

Other General Revit Issues:

• You can't reference a string/text parameter in parameter formula... the parameter just gives up.

• There's no way to create ENUM parameter options... No way to create a useful list of dropdown options to keep users from typing "MLO" as 'M.L.O', 'Mlo', 'mlo', 'Main Lugs Only'... or any of the other 500 ways that can be written incorrectly with this level of freedom. Oh, but don't forget, even if it was written consistently, you still can't use it to drive any other parameters, because it's a text parameter.

Everytime I have to build or edit an electrical equipment family in Revit, I want to cry... but instead, I usually end up yelling "WHY???!!! WHYYY?????!!!!!, AUTODESK WWWHHHHYYYYY??????!!!!!!."
I would love to know the name of the electrical engineer who first helped autodesk implement electrical... because they clearly didn't know what they were doing... And Autodesk still has no clue what to do, so they've just ignored electrical and shoved us into a corner.