Display breaker rating in mechanical schedule?

[MuirEng]

Hi,

Electrican engineering question. I wish I asked this on answer day!

Model contains mechanical equipment family instances, and we calculate or enter MOCP (minimum over current protection) and have it as a property of each instance.

We have a schedule which displays all this equipment along MOCP value along with the panel and circuit #.

The breaker size needs to match or exceed the MOCP but the way Revit works it forces us to manage this independantly in the circuit properties, and we have need manually and carefully check to make sure the two values are coordinated.

Circuit rating does not seem to be accessible like panel and circuit#. Can anyone think of a way to display circuit breaker rating in the mechanical schedule to facilitate an easy side by side comparison, or offer other suggestions?

[fabiosato]

Hello,

I have never tried, but I guess this can be achieved only through Dynamo or API.

[Anonymous]

Short answer - no.  Your schedule references mechanical equipment, the breaker size is a property of the circuit.  You may not even be able to accomplish this with Dynamo, I've had trouble with anythign that's hard-coded in Revit working with Dynamo scripts, though I haven't tried this one.  You might be able to export the value from the circuit to Excel, then import it into your mechanical schedule, but you'll need a separate "Breaker Size" parameter applied to mechanical equipment.

[MuirEng]

okay, thanks. It sounds like we need to continue to manage this manually. Bit of a bummer....

[Anonymous]

Doesn't MOCP stand for maximum overcurrent protection ?

[Anonymous]

Yup. Also, those values should be type parameters, not instance.

[MuirEng]

I understand the point, but we just do electrical here, so a generic family for things like heat pumps with instance parameter is okay with us.

And yes, agreed, typo in OP, should read maximum, good catch.

[Anonymous]

This is a huge issue for us...I don't want to have two separate parameters for breaker size (one in equipment schedule and one in the panelboard schedule). That is just asking to mess something up. Unfortunately I've also not found a solution to this. The breaker trip is a property of the circuit and there doesn't seem to be any way to feed that thru to the equipment itself.

[Anonymous]

I don't want to have two separate parameters for breaker size (one in equipment schedule and one in the panelboard schedule).

I wouldn't do this either.  Rule of thumb: never show something in two places when one will suffice.  We never put breaker size in our mechanical equipment schedule (Equipment Electrical Requirements).  Panel-Ckt, wire and conduit size, and a note to refer to the panel schedule.

[Anonymous]

so when you are trying to coordinate with mechanical info, you are swapping back and forth between panel schedules, the equipment schedule, and mechanical drawings?

[Anonymous]

so when you are trying to coordinate with mechanical info, you are swapping back and forth between panel schedules, the equipment schedule, and mechanical drawings?

Quite a bit less than we used to prior to adopting Revit.  We have a library of shared parameters accessible to all disciplines.  The ME's are responsible for providing voltage, phase, and load (FLA, MCA, HP, VA, whatever the cut sheet has).  But their schedules and ours are built using the same set of parameters, so any value they input into their schedules will be automatically populated in ours as well.  Once we circuit the equipment, we can see the load in the panel schedule and size the breaker appropriately within the panel schedule.  The panel/ckt fields in our equipment schedule also populate automatically once the equipment is circuited.

Obviously no process is perfect and we still have to actually talk to each other/look at each other's drawings and schedules, but it's way more efficient and far less error prone than the pre-BIM processes were.

[Anonymous]

do you guys work in the same model as mechanical or are you copy/monitoring their equipment?

[Anonymous]

Same model.  

On the few occasions we haven't been in the same model we've used J-boxes for equipment connections/circuiting.  Once the M and E elements are split into two different models you lose any automated coordination capabilities.  You might as well be back to paper and pencil.

[Anonymous]

heh, yea. That's basically where we are. TRYING to justify spending time with revit but not able to automate a lot of things I thought I would have been able to. Thanks for your help.

[Anonymous]

TRYING to justify spending time with revit but not able to automate a lot of things I thought I would have been able to.

It took us about 2 years and a couple dozen projects to get things really working smoothly, and there are still occasional hiccups.  I think a large part of the problem many MEP types have with Revit is the way it was sold to them as this wonderful automatic design robot.  That's not really how it works - used properly it can make your design way more efficient, and a lot of things that previously took hours/days now can be done nearly instantly.  But at the end of the day we still have to actually design buildings.  Revit just makes storing, accessing, and coordinating the data we use to do so a lot easier once you get accustomed to it.  Seven years ago we were where it sounds like you are now and I absolutely despised working in Revit.  Now I can't imagine trying to go back to CAD.