Dual 3-way switching

[kcrum]

I am currently working on a number of rooms that will have a two sets of double doors in each.  At each door we will have two 3-way switches that will control the inner and outer lamps of the 2x4 recessed troffers.  I am not attending training for another couple of weeks so I am trudging through this program and scrounging through forumns to find any help I can get.  Any suggestions on where I should start?  We added an extra connection to the fixture so I have the primary connection and then a secondary for the second switch.

[CoreyDaun · Accepted solution]

Three-way switching is not possible in Revit using Switch Systems - a Switch System can only contain a single switch. This had been my example of how Revit Electrical is severely lacking. This is a very basic design technique and Revit is not capable of it. The work-around would be to include a Shared Parameter in your Switch Family and associated Tag Family to represent the switch leg. This will require manual data entry.

Dual (or multi-) ballast fixtures are another issue. While one can add and connect multiple Electrical Connectors to a light fixture, the element itself can only be assigned to a single Switch System. Furthermore, Tags can only report the data from the Primary Electrical Connector, so if the second Connector is routed to another Panel, unless the Wire is Tagged with said information. The work-around I am currently using for accurate dual-ballast fixtures is to model a separate Family as the secondary ballast (with an Electrical Connector), marked that Family as Shared, and then load that into the primary Family. When a nested Family is designated as Shared, the nested Family will be treated as an independent element once in the Project environment, so the secondary ballast Family can be added to a Switch System without including the host Family.

Also, dual-switches is not directly possible when the dual-switches are modeled as a single Family, since the entire element counts as a single switch. The work-around is to either use a Shared Parameter as per the top paragraph here, or to model the secondary switch as a Shared Nested Family with an Electrical Connector, as per the second paragraph.

This is likely a little bit over one's head without any training, so if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!