I'm starting to tag my thermostats with the equipment mark and number that it's associated with for clarity and as of right now am just using a tag with dumb text in it. Does anyone know of a way to "link" the thermostat with it's equipment so when I change the mark/number on the equipment it automatically updates the thermostat's tag? Right now we're using an electrical fixture for our thermostats so they'll host to the wall. Have been playing around with jimmy-rigging the circuiting between the equipment and thermostat to show what I want but so far nothing has been working. Thanks in advance!
I don't think that there's a way to link values between a thermostat and a piece of Mechanical Equipment. I know this isn't the best method, but what if you Tagged the Mechanical Equipment with an additional Tag and moved it to the thermostat? This is not a very good solution if the equipment or thermostat is prone to being moved.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————
On another note, if you want to have a face-based Mechanical Equipment family, you can use one of the Face-Based templates and then change the Category to Mechanical Equipment. There is a problem that you'll encounter if you aim to use a nested Generic Annotation as a symbol; for this category, the annotation symbol won't appear in Plan View, just in Elevation Views. To create a "correct" family, follow these steps...
1. Create a new Family using the "Lighting Fixture wall based.rft" template. Create an extrusion as a placeholder (it doesn't matter what it looks like or where it is).
2. Start a New Project, draw a Wall, load the Family into it, and place an instance onto the Wall. Save this Project somewhere temporarily and close it.
3. Start another New Project and link in the previously created Project. Use the Copy/Monitor tools to create a Copy of the Family in this Project.
4. Open the Family for editing and change its Category to Mechanical Equipment. It'll take a little tweaking to touch it up, but you can now save it somewhere. This Family will display the Generic Annotation in Plan View regardless of it's Category.