Understand how to effectively connect and coordinate various systems in architectural software, Revit, in this detailed walkthrough. Discover how to create, separate, and extend lines, as well as how to use the system browser tool to view and manage all the components within your project.
Key Insights
- The article showcases how to connect different systems within Revit, starting from drawing and extending both hot and cold water lines, and then trimming the ends to ensure that they are properly aligned and connected.
- The author explains the importance of precision within Revit, emphasizing that, unlike in the field, Revit works according to the specific tolerances set, ensuring a high level of accuracy in the connections and alignments within the system.
- The article also introduces the System Browser tool in Revit, which provides a hierarchical list of all components within a project, useful for identifying components that may not be assigned to a system or to show load or flow calculations. This tool also helps in identifying any unassigned items in the system.
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We've connected those on the first floor—great. I'm going to go to my 3D view, and you can group these commands together. So I kind of did this one whole system first, and then I did this, or I did this whole system first, then I came over and did this system.
Here's another way I can do it. I could just go ahead, and I'm going to create—make sure again I'm on that 90 degrees. I'm going to create both of these here.
Make sure you're not clicking the connectors, and then I'm going to go do this other side. So I'm going to draw my 90 degrees here. 90,90, Draw Pipe, 90.
And I know that they're inside of each other right now. So I'm going to go to my Level 2 Plumbing, and I'm going to go ahead and start to separate these. So my cold water, I'm going to bring over just a little bit.
My hot water, I'm going to take out just a little bit. Same thing down here. So I'm accomplishing the same exact task.
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I'm just deciding to do it in a different operation—a different order, per se. That's okay. Again, I might want to take this—and that's the fitting for that—
So I could take that and slide that, and notice how it's moving my fitting. And there we go. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to trim the ends first.
So Trim here, pick there, pick there, pick here, pick here. Oh, a little too short. I'm probably a little too close to that edge of the wall.
Again, Revit wants to be very, very precise. You know, in the field, they might be able to make that connection work. Here, Revit is going to be bound to tolerances. So once I've trimmed those together, I go to the Trim/Extend Multiple command.
I'm going to start with my hot water lines. And there we go. Boom.
Then I'm going to go to my cold water lines. Select what I want to extend to, pick the object I want to extend. And there we go.
We're done with that one. Let's come up to this one here. So again, I'm going to trim the cold water and the hot water down to the end.
See? Nope—it doesn't want to work yet. We just have to shift this guy over just a smidge. I think another reason why we're going to need the thicker wall here is because we need to get vent lines and everything up.
Here, I'm going to go there, click on my Multiple, go there, there, there, and here. Click off, click on my hot water line—here, here—and work my way down. Perfect.
And there we are. If I go to my 3D view, I can zoom out, and I believe we've connected all of our hot and cold water. Now, we have a lot of systems in this, so there's another way that we could go ahead and look at this.
I want to say it's under View. Let's see—User Interface, System Browser. So this is a way of displaying a hierarchical list of all the components in each discipline in a project, either by system or zone.
You can use the System Browser to find components that may not be assigned to a system or to show load or flow calculations. If you wanted to find floating objects—those kinds of things—you could use the System Browser to identify those very quickly. But if I check the System Browser on, you can see that I have a Mechanical system, as I have 10 unassigned items.
We can see what those are. Let's go. We have 10 unassigned domestic cold water systems.
And if you select it, it's going to pick those there. So because those items are not tied into anything, they are showing up there under that. Under Sanitary, we have a couple of lavatories, because these are all the connectors.
These are the different connectors that are associated with those items. So this lavatory is being selected for these three items because these connectors exist on the same exact family. If I go to Piping, you'll notice I have 28 systems.
I have domestic cold water there—that's all one system here. And again, sometimes it's not always perfect.
And there we go. And then domestic hot water. So I have many domestic hot water systems here.
And that kind of selected the entire system and made it nice. It's all about the order that you draw it in. We have a natural gas system.
This is the system coming off the point of connection to the meter, and this is the system going into here. If I go into Sanitary, you can see I have a lot of sanitary systems.
It breaks them down kind of individually. You can see—because of how I’ve drawn these and haven’t tied them in yet—each one of those P-traps is kind of its own system because we haven’t tied them in yet. Okay.
So the System Browser is really nice. It's almost like a schedule, but it allows you to see a lot of great information. And then you can even expand these out further.
If I say, I want to see how many items are in this, I can say, okay, it's the domestic hot water. And then it’s all these sinks, and you can get down into the individual objects themselves. Cool.
I'm going to go ahead and close my System Browser. I'm going to go ahead—let's go ahead and save the file.