Using Families in Revit for Mechanical Equipment Placement

So from here, I want to go ahead and use that family. Now we've traditionally done, you know, those families, we can go up here to systems, we can go up here to mechanical equipment. I do want to show you another way of getting families and using them.

I'm going to go into this, into my families on my project browser. I'm going to go down. I'm just going to grab the biggest one for right now.

I'm going to select it. I'm going to do a right click on it and then create instance. And what that does is that has now started me creating an instance.

Now, since this is a face hosted family, and as it's a face hosted family, I have some options up here so I can place on face, which now you can see I'm actually placing on the ceiling of it, which is kind of where I want this to be. This kind of wants to be over the door place on work plane. I could choose a work plane.

If I wanted to be like level one or level two, that would be a work plane or place on vertical face. So place on vertical face allows me to go ahead and, uh, put it in on a wall. Now you may notice that my cursor is changing.

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Well, that's because it's hosting to this face, but since I'm in a reflected ceiling plan view, it's below my cut range. So what I'm going to go and do is let's go ahead and move it up to eight feet. So I'm going to go eight feet and I should, Oh, maybe nine.

Let's see here. It's not wanting to show up. Okay.

That's fine. We're going to put it in there. So I'm going to put it in on this wall, kind of above the door.

Oh, and that wants to go ahead and pop up. So it could have just been where Revit was kind of like, okay, your first initial placement, it doesn't want to go ahead and do it, uh, to show it because it hasn't been placed yet. Then once I place it, it went ahead and put it in.

I'm going to go ahead, hit escape. And there we are with our little Mitsubishi cooling unit. I'm going to go and align it to the center line of my door.

A lot of times I've seen that the area of the right above the door is kind of the clear area of the room. And we can go ahead and put this guy in there. So I'm going to go AL for a line.

I'm going to pick the center line of the door and I'm going to pick the center line of the unit. And there we go. I do want to bring my working section over really quickly.

So I'm going to zoom out and find one of my working sections, bring it over here. And I'm just going to double check to make sure my elevation is good here. Remember when you're working in Revit, you're always working in 3D.

So a lot of times people will forget. And I very commonly, I'll see these say like on the ground, um, or other types of devices on the ground because they weren't placed properly. So I can see here that it's right above the head of the door.

I probably want it to go a little bit higher. So I'm going to select it and I'm going to change this to eight foot six, just so that it's a bit above the actual door jam. You can kind of see the profile of the door jam here.

We want to go ahead and have this guy up. Great. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to go back to my, my working plan and you can see my little unit there.

Let's go ahead and take a quick peek at the heat pump. So I'm going to go ahead. We only have one type here, but remember if I want to edit the family, I'm going to go ahead, hover over this, right click edit, and let's take a quick peek at this.

So it's the same kind of thing. Now, the other difference here in this one is that this is all modeled right here. If you recall previously, the previous one that we had was going to be just a, or it was, it was a nested family.

In this instance, they decided that they don't need the nested family and they just modeled it right here. Now, based on how this is kind of rendering a little bit, I wonder if they've changed the look of it based on detail value detail level. We'll take a peek at that.

So down here at the bottom, there's a preview visibility. What this allows me to do is it allows me to see, you know, families are composed of different types. This preview visibility down here allows me to see how the family would look at different times.

So you can kind of see, I got rid of all of that, uh, weird kind of like flickering. That's because it's only showing me what I need to see. What is defined by this view or this type.

I'm going to choose this and I'm going to change it down to medium. Let's see what happens. So medium, I've kind of gotten rid of all the materials and all the casing.

And if I go to course, course and medium are the same again, different manufacturers do it in different ways. You can see, I have some connectors here. These are going to be for my supply and return refrigerant lines.

And there we go. We have our little feed down here. These are all just modeled in.

If I set it to fine, then I can start to see some of maybe the casing and the other materials there. Great. So it's pretty standard family.

If I go look at the types here, you can see, I have the same kind of thing, the materials and finishes, the electrical, the dimensions. So these dimensions can be maybe a little adjusted, uh, because they are parameters. Um, let's see what else here.

Okay. Clearances. You can set your clearances, what has a bunch of other materials or other parameters, but fan quantity, what the fan type is, you know, clearance restraints, a refrigerant charge, what type of refrigerant is it? Um, and then getting into the identity data, the same kind of thing to where, Hey, this Mitsubishi product line, notice that they did not put under the menu.

Oh, there it is. Mitsubishi heavy industries. So again, if I wanted under manufacture for this to say, be all capitalized.

Um, if I can spell it correctly and it's right next to me, be heavy industries, I click off and see how that changes there to caps. When I schedule that, or I tag that element, if it has a manufacturer tag associated with it, or, uh, a mechanical equipment tag that lists that manufacturer parameter, it would show it in all caps. A lot of times, you know, in our, in our design work in our drafting, we always use all caps.

A lot of the manufacturers don't stick to that. So I'm going to go ahead and leave that like that. I'm going to go ahead and hit.

Okay. There we go. And there's not really too much, anything crazy with this family.

It's a pretty standard. I also do have an electrical connector so that my electrician, if they so wanted, they could tie it into their system, into their disconnect, and then back to their panel if they so needed to, to do their panel scheduling. But pretty simple, pretty straight forward family, good looking family.

Not anything too crazy. Some of the parameters, I will say that I'm not a huge fan. I've seen parameters for like YouTube links or, uh, other links to outside data.

A lot of times too, what we'll end up doing is we'll just use this family as kind of a starting point. We may remove say the Mitsubishi logo or a couple of other things. You know, this is the general size and representation of the element, but the menu or the, the contractor may not necessarily use a Mitsubishi specific element, they may decide to go with a different manufacturer for whatever reason.

But there we go. So I'm going to go ahead and close this out. No, I don't need to save it.

Oh, actually, no, I do want to save because we made that change to the, uh, the parameter for manufacturer. And actually I'm going to hit cancel. The reason why is because I've made changes here, but I need to load those back into the one that's in the model.

If I just close it and don't save, because I changed that parameter here, it's not going to do anything to my, the version that is in my Revit project. So I'm going to go ahead, hit load project, load into project and close. Now I don't need to save it here per se, because I don't need to save a version of this on my machine or my server.

The file or the family that is in the actual project will be my records. I'm going to hit no, I'm going to load this in. I'm going to overwrite the existing version.

And there we go. It's overwritten. So I'm going to head up to my roof plant and let's go ahead and find a place for this guy.

So I want to go ahead. So this is an exhaust fan. Now, traditionally exhaust fans need to have 10 feet clear from any intake.

So obviously we are 10 feet away from this guy. We're good. We can put the condensing unit right here because the condensing unit is an exhaust element.

So I'm going to go down here using this new method of creating a fan, creating an instance of a family. I go down to this H this heat pump, right? Click create instance. There we go.

And it's putting it on the roof, but it's not quite in our view yet. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to place it about here. And it's going to tell me none of the create elements are visible in floor plan three roof working view.

You may want to check the active view. It's parameters and visibility settings. Well, I know I placed one.

I'm going to go out to my 3D view here and let's take a peek. Let's find it. Okay.

So there it is. We might need to move it up. Now, what was this guy hosted to? So this guy was 10 foot 10.

Let's make that a little nicer. 10 foot 10 above our roof. I'm going to take this guy and move it to the same height.

10 foot 10. So because we were looking at our roof plan, right. It wanted to put it on the roof level.

Well, I just offset it up so I can see it again. I'm giving some space maybe for a curb or something underneath mounting pads, and we can always coordinate that a little bit with the architect later. If I want to go ahead and take a look at it in my section, I'm going to go, I don't have any.

Oh, here's my working section. Here we go. Let's go ahead and take a look at this guy.

So you can see, maybe I don't necessarily need to be 10 foot 10. Maybe I can go ahead and maybe go 10 foot six. This can be a little bit closer and we'll go, let's go 10 feet.

There we go. Cause this may have a smaller curb on it because the exhaust fan may need a larger curb, a larger curb due to the fact that has ductwork coming up and all that kind of stuff. This guy can be a little bit lower and we obviously don't want to be able to see it from the ground level.

If I take a look at in 3D, I can see where my refrigerant lines are. Maybe I want to rotate it. Well, when I can go ahead and do this at space bar and I can rotate it so that now my refrigerant lines are kind of facing towards probably where I'm going to be, maybe going through the wall or going through the roof.

Perfect. We've taken a look at these two families and we've placed instances of each family. We have the mechanical equipment here on the roof, and then we have on our ceiling one mechanical plan.

We have our little guy here. I'm going to stop this video here and we'll see you in the next one.