Learn how to place power outlets or receptacles in power plans using Revit. This tutorial discusses the process of editing power plans and preparing them for the addition of various types of outlets, including floor outlets and appliance outlets.
Key Insights
- The article explores how to place different types of outlets in power plans using Revit, including GFCI outlets, duplex outlets, floor outlets, simplex outlets, and appliance outlets.
- It provides guidance on editing power plans for ease of view, such as adjusting the visibility and graphics overrides model, changing the view detail level to display receptacles as symbols, and turning off unnecessary model categories.
- The tutorial also teaches how to update view templates across all associated plans, and how to prepare these plans for the addition of receptacles.
Now we're ready to place power outlets or receptacles in our power plans. Those words can be used interchangeably. I will try to use the word receptacles, but if you hear me say outlets, it means the same thing.
Essentially a device we can plug power equipment into. Now Revit has GFCI outlets and duplex outlets in the basic project templates, but we can also ring in floor outlets, simplex outlets, or we can even bring in larger appliance outlets. So let's go back to our project and we want to open up our two power plans.
If we go into our project browser, we're looking for our electrical section, floor plans, power plan. And we want to double click to open up both the L1 and L2 power plans. I'm gonna go to my L1 power plan and I'm going to zoom in a little bit and I have a couple of issues with this floor plan.
Number one, I'm seeing the lighting fixtures and I'm seeing the architect's lighting fixtures. Also, if I zoom in close, I can see that there are some receptacles in the plan, but they are shown as their actual size, very small rectangle. I want to show the symbol.
So let's make a couple of edits to make this plan easier to view. Now, if I go to the view properties, I want to go to the left where we have our identity data and view template, right here where it says electrical power plan. That's the correct template, but let's make some modifications.
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First, I want to go to VG, visibility and graphics overrides model. I'll click edit. And one thing I want to notice here is that if I scroll down and find electrical fixtures and equipment, their detail level is set to fine.
And that's what's giving us those tiny receptacles. And that can be frustrating when you're not sure why it's not showing the symbol. It could be this right here.
It's set to fine. I want to change it to by view because the view itself is set to course and the course view detail level will display those as symbols, just how we want them. Now let's jump all the way across to the Revit links tab.
And we were seeing those architectural lights, so we need to turn them off. Background architectural is currently set to host view, by host view. I click that button and I want to change that basics tab to custom.
Then I can go to model categories and I can change that to custom as well. So model categories, custom, and I want to turn a few things off. I'm going to scroll down and all of the electrical devices, electrical equipment, electrical fixtures, lighting devices, lighting fixtures, I can uncheck the box for all of those.
I also noticed earlier that the site might be giving us issues. So I'm going to scroll down to site and uncheck that box as well. There were just some of these items showing up as well.
So let's go ahead and click okay and okay again. Now we don't want to see lights in general. The architects lights or our electrical lights either.
So I want to go down in the view properties and find the view range and click the edit button. Now the top is set to 10 feet and that's why we see a lot of these light fixtures because the top is so high up into the ceiling. I want to drop that down to about seven feet and click okay.
With that, I will click okay again. And this plan is starting to look pretty good. I now can see the receptacles as a symbol and I think everything's looking pretty solid here.
The one thing I might update here on level one, there's this extra corridor label and it's kind of weird coming through with the architectural model. So I'm going to delete that. If I have any room tags that are way out of bounds, I can move a couple into place.
And I think that's pretty good for now. Let's jump to the L2 power plan, double click to see it. And we'll just verify that all those changes are good.
Why did this plan update? It's because we're using that same view template. If we update the view template anywhere, it updates all of the plans associated to that view template. So this one is looking really good too.
And I think we're ready to add in our receptacles.