Installing an Exhaust Fan in Revit Mechanical System

Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for the Revit mechanical course. In the previous video, we finished up our exhaust system and we need to go ahead and place our fan and then coordinate the system a little bit. So currently, I don't believe that there is a fan currently loaded into the project.

Let's take a peek. I'm going to go to structure or excuse me, I'm going to go systems. I'm going to go to my mechanical equipment and I don't think, let's see your fan.

So I do have some fans here, but not really the one that I want. So what I'm going to end up doing is I want to load in a family. So I'm going to hit escape.

I'm going to go to my insert tab. Now, traditionally how families have been loaded, you could go just load family and you would pick something from content that is installed on your machine. If I hit load family is probably going to take me to this location here and it says, oh, are you looking for content? Go to this autodesk.com and download and install the content.

Well, recently they've added in what they call load Autodesk family. All the content used to be installed with the software when you installed it. Well, they no longer really do that because that really increased install times.

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So they've created this cloud-based Autodesk content library. If I go to load Autodesk family, I can come into here and this has all the content. There is a search up here in the top.

What I can go ahead and do, or I can just look down the items that I have here. So I know I'm looking for an exhaust fan. I want to go ahead.

I'm going to go to mechanical. I want to scroll down. So you can see I have mechanical architectural aspects.

I have MEP aspects, and there's a bit more in the way of all the different mechanical types of equipment in here and, and a lot of other pieces. I would really take some time to kind of browse through this load Autodesk family with what they have available because you can use quite a bit of it. So I'm going to go into the mechanical here.

I'm going to go down to the MEP. This is kind of where a lot of the equipment is. And what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to find fans and blowers.

And so you have all of these different fans. You have a couple of different visual styles here that you can look at it. You can change it from like this grid view to more of a list in a sense that just lists them.

I kind of like this one a little bit more just because it allows me to see the entire name of the family. If I go back to like the tile view, you can't really see the entire name of the family there. If I go ahead, I'm going to go ahead and go back to this view type.

And I'm going to get this exhaust ventilator down blast pick. I'm going to go ahead hit load. And I'm going to go ahead and overwrite if it pops up to overwrite.

Because we didn't see it. And that's okay. I'm going to go to my systems.

I'm going to go to mechanical equipment. And let's see maybe I type in exhaust again. And there we go.

So exhaust ventilator down blast standard, pick that. Now I can place it in 3D if I want to. But I'm going to go ahead so if I let's just see what happens.

I'm going to pick and I don't see it. Well, I want to why I don't see it. Let's look at our parameters here.

So I see level one, it's set at zero feet zero inches, which is kind of rough. So technically, it's on the floor on level one. I'm going to go ahead hit escape CTRL Z to undo.

I'm going to go to my my roof plan here. So I can kind of see where when I'm working with going to go roof here. There we go.

So I see where my duct is. I know that this is there's a roof down here. Again, I can't see it because it's out of my view range.

And I know that there's a really high roof right here. I think I want to get this fan actually up on this roof. There really wasn't a good place to put this.

We're going to get up on this higher roof here. So what I'm going to go and do is I'm gonna go mechanical equipment. I still have exhaust ventilator down blast.

Notice my level though has changed a roof. I'm going to go ahead take it and pick. Now it's going to give me an error saying or a warning, not necessarily an error, but none of the elements created are visible for plan three roof working view.

So let's take a look. I'm going to hit escape. I'm going to change my view range, or my view style.

Now notice I can't change it here. And that is because I have a view template applied. So a lot of times on my working views, I try not to apply view templates.

View templates are great for your sheets to maintain consistency across ceiling plans, floor plans, elevations, interior elevations, building sections. But on my working views, I don't really like to have view templates applied just so that I can change the settings whenever I need to. So I'm going to go over here to my view template.

I'm going to check none, hit apply, hit okay. Now I can come back here and hit wireframe. So let's figure out where our exhaust fan went.

So I'm gonna go to my 3D view. Now notice that it's not really showing up. There it is right there in the window.

So that's because that is where the roof level is. Now what I can go ahead and do is I'm going to change the in this 3D view, I can change the discipline. And I'm going to change it to be mechanical.

Notice how when I change it to mechanical, my view range or my view, the Revit link, the architectural link kind of becomes kind of half toned and also transparent. So I can see my entire mechanical system kind of makes it nice. We see that our exhaust fan is just kind of floating in here.

What I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to go ahead and take a look in section. So let's go to our level two working view for the ceiling mechanical. There is my lovely exhaust fan, we want to go ahead, we're going to place it kind of over away from everything.

When we're placing this mechanical equipment on the roof, we want to be aware of our distances from like edges and parapets. There's fall protection that may be required per those conditions. There's also possibly you know, it's hard to roof when the hard to create a waterproof and flash and do all those other kinds of things around this fan when it's very close to a parapet edge.

So I'm going to take my section, I'm going to go ahead and rotate it. There we go. And then we need kind of need to see where I want to make it a little deeper here.

I kind of want to see where this duct needs to run. So let's go to our section. Well, obviously, we want this to not be on the roof level, we want this to be on the library top level.

So I'm going to take this guy and I can offset it up. So let's say I want to go up 10 feet. Now 10 feet puts me above the roof level.

And realistically, from an architectural sense, this would probably have some sort of curb underneath it. So it may be that it needs to be 18 inches above this roof. So let's go ahead and put a dimension.

We're gonna go from here to here. So what I ended up doing was I did a dimension, I was very specific in picking this point first. So this is the reference point to there.

I couldn't pick the bottom edge of this, because it's not in the same angle as the roof. So I pick that point, I pick the roof, I see it's five inches up, I'm going to select it. And then I'm going to go ahead and take this.

And let's go ahead and make it let's say 16 inches up. So zero space 16, enter one foot four. And then that allows for a little bit of a roof curb there.

So what we need to go and do now though, is we need to get this duct up into this space, and then come over. So what I'm going to go do is I'm going to go back to my plan view. And we're actually going to bring this guy and come back over here.

Now, you have to be careful when you're doing something like this, because what's going to watch what ends up happening, I'm going to drag in place. Oh, it didn't actually do it. Nice.

So it seems like they've kind of maybe figured out some of the auto routing a little bit more in this recent version. But it does not want to connect directly to that. Sometimes I've had it happen to where it wants to tie down into that and then create a connection there to this particular duct.

What I'm going to end up doing is when now draw duct and come over. There we go. Now I have found sometimes a lot of times when creating the connections between this mechanical equipment and this duct here, it's nice to have a piece of duct coming out of this already, and then just aligning it and then trimming them together.

Kind of been the best practice that I've found. But I also like to have my section running parallel with those. So I want to take my section and rotate it.

I'm going to come down here. I'm going to go ahead. And let's go ahead and draw a portion of the duct up.

Here we go. Then here, I can go ahead. I want to click this connector to create the duct down.

Now it's created my tap short radius. My diameter is 15. I'm actually going to make it 16.

So it matches up with my other duct. And I'm going to come straight through the roof here. Boom.

There we go. And I can always adjust this if I need to. If I want to get these more as such.

Now I can align these. And it's going to align them in this plane. But if I look at it in 3D, it may not necessarily be aligned in the other direction.

So again, in this view, I can go ahead and hit Align. So under Modify, Align. I could pick this here.

Pick this here. And it's going to align it in this particular view. But let's go take a look at our 3D view.

So I'm going to click on the little house. And notice that it aligned it in our view this way, left to right. But it did not align it here.

What you can do, and sometimes Revit will allow you to do it, is I could tab through and select that center reference. And then I tab through here, select this center reference, and it aligns them together. So you can do some 3D alignment, which I think is really cool and really nice.

What I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to go Align. I'm going to get that center line reference there. And just tab through here, get that center line reference, and good to go.

Perfect. Then once I've aligned it there, I can go ahead and trim. Pick there, pick there.

Nope, it doesn't like it. Again, sometimes I might need to go to my section. Let's see if it wants to do it here.

And it wants to do it just fine there. Revit MEP, Revit Mechanical can sometimes be a little picky in how you do things. So let's go ahead and take a look at the rest of our system here.

I'm going to get this because I know this is the gym area. Now, it's okay if I penetrate into this gym for the exhaust to get to this. Maybe the architect will eventually put a soffit in here or something like that.

That's not really our big worry right now. I'm going to go ahead and drag this guy up just so that I have, you know, some space, but I'm not terribly, you don't want to do something like this, where say the fitting is into the roof deck. You do want to have some space, typically about a foot or so.

Again, it varies on project to project, but you typically want to have a straight run of duct to create this opening in the roof. I may notice, I kind of noticed over here that I lost some elements. Not exactly sure when that happened, but it's an easy fix.

Let's go to our 3D view. So you click on the level house. And then since I'm still in this coordination view, I can still see through everything.

I'm just going to go here to trim, pick that, pick this, boom. And there we go. Great.

We've created our exhaust system for the bathrooms. I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here and we'll see you in the next ones.