Electrical Connections in a Family

[jondan]

Per my needs listed below, allowing multi-selecting on the "Select Connector" pop-up would be all that would be necessary to fix my marina design woes in this area.

Briefly, to get marina electrical plans, circuiting, demanding, and loading to display properly for the client and per code's allowances, I need to:

• Have a Demand Factor to calculate by quantity - electrical connections must be powered on panel
• Have every receptacle be demanded by quantity - (1) electrical connection per receptacle
• Have a single shore power pedestal have multiple receptacles included - (1) family with multiple electrical connections
• Have a single pedestal be powered by a single circuit - entire family (multiple electrical connections) powered by (1) circuit

As it currently stands, if I want to have more than one electrical connection in a family, I must assign one as the Primary connection, and one as the Secondary connection. I have need for a single family with multiple electrical connections (up to four), that can powered by the same circuit. This could be achieved easily simply by allowing multi-selecting on the "Select Connector" pop-up.

This is especially important when designing an electrical system for marinas. Marina shore power pedestals, as a single manufacturer-built assembly, can include multiple receptacles of various amperes and voltages. As a designer, for both consistency and efficiency's sake, I would desire to place the once assembly on the plan, with type/instance parameters dictating the actual orientation of receptacles. When considering the wiring of this pedestal, we design to have one feed hit this pedestal, so that all receptacles built within it are powered by one circuit.

Some might suggest to have one electrical connection to include any desired receptacle loads on it, but this is further complicated by the allowances of the NEC involving marina power design. 555.12 allows for demanding of the total power of the marina shore power based on quantity of shore power receptacles on a given piece of equipment. To have a panel schedule "smartly" include this Demand Factor, I must make use of the "By quantity" calculation method, which counts the powered electrical connections on the panel.

[aaron.jonesSAP83]

This would be amazing on our plug mold family as well.  Most of the time when we're using those, it's in a medical lab which can have a large variety of equipment and thus a large variety of circuit needs.  Sometimes we want our plug mold to have every receptacle dedicated, and sometimes we want to bring just one circuit to the whole installation.  As it stands now, we're slowly getting the rest of the office on board with the very idea of using Revit to do our systems calculations instead of Excel, but this is one of the many issues I've run into that makes people more apprehensive.

[smbrennan]

Quick Workaround:

1. Created a little quarter-sized element electrical fixture family. Add the electrical connector and associate the parameters to family/shared parameters and make sure all of those are instance-based. 
2. Load that family into another family. Associate the instance parameters with the parameters in the current family.
3. Load that family into your project
4. Tab-Select the nested elements to circuit. 

[Anonymous]

Can the connector in the nested family have a different load classification as the host family? I'm thinking no but would like to have 2 connectors in one family that can be connected to the same circuit but have different load classifications. For heat pumps, I would like the strip heat to be under heat and the fan be under motor. Do you have a solution for this? (Other than having separate families. For now I'm creating a view that  won't be on the sheets and then use the other on the actual view so they both calculate in the panels. Thanks for any help.

[smbrennan]

Yes, you could. You would have to have 2 parameters for load classification in the host family, and associate that parameter to the respective nested families. I forgot to mention, that the nested elements need to have all of their electrical parameters as instance based - it's just much easier to work with once loaded into another family. This is what allows you to select the nested item, and associate the instance parameters of that family with the parameters of the host family.