Preparing Revit Electrical Power Plans and Equipment for Building Projects

This is so exciting. Now that we have an analytical understanding of our loads and power distribution, we can start to model the electrical devices in our project. To do this, we will need a couple of floor plans.

Let's go up to the view tab and we want to find the plan views and select floor plan. The type is going to be power plan and we want both L1 and L2 power plans and click OK. If we look in our project browser, we can find these views under electrical floor plans power plan.

Let's expand this. We can see L2 and L1. Let's give these some better names.

For the L1, we'll right click and click rename and we'll call this L1 power plan and enter to complete that rename. The second one we will rename as well and we'll call this L2 power plan. While we're here, we notice that the electrical analysis floor plans could be renamed as well.

We can do that. Let's right click on L1 and rename L1 electrical analysis. We don't need to rename any corresponding views.

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We just need to rename the second view L2 and we'll call this also electrical analysis. No need to rename any corresponding views. Awesome.

Now that we've got all of our names cleaned up, we can go ahead and adjust some portions of this view to make them look a little bit nicer. Let's go to L1 power plan. Right here in the properties for this floor plan, if I scroll down, let's find our view template.

It's under identity data and it's currently set to none. Let's click the word none and we can start with our electrical power plan. Great place to start electrical power plan, but we want to make a few edits to this.

Let's click on visibility and graphics overrides model and click edit. Let's go down to rooms and we notice they are currently turned off. I want to click the check box to turn the rooms on and expand this and turn color fill off.

That's it for rooms. Now let's go back up a little bit to lines. We'll expand this category and we're looking for our analytical lines.

We have all of these analytical areas that we don't need to see anymore and so we will find our area-based load boundary and uncheck that box. We don't need to have those pink boundary lines showing in this view. That's it for model categories.

Let's jump over to our analytical model categories and we currently have filtered multiple. Let's change this just to electrical to make it easier to read and I don't need to have the electrical analytical loads showing in these plans. We'll uncheck that box.

That turns them all off. Now let's go to annotation categories and the one thing we want to turn off here are our match lines. We'll scroll down and turn off the match line.

With that, all those settings, we'll click okay and okay again. We'll give it a moment and notice that our power plan has updated. It's a little bit cleaner looking here.

Let's go to our level 2 power plan now. Double click there and now that we have a view template set up, we can simply click on the view template and apply it. It's our electrical power plan and click okay and those same settings will apply here now as well.

Now let's go back to our level 1 power plan for now and right here in our L1 power plan, we want to go ahead and add some room tags. We're going to go to the annotate tab and then we're going to do tag all and we want to include elements from linked files because all of those room tags or rooms come from the architectural linked file. We want to scroll down and find room tags.

We do not want leader and we'll click okay. That populates many room tags. That looks pretty good.

Let's go to our L2 power plan, double click here and right here we can go ahead and go up to our annotate, tag all, include elements from linked files, find our room tags, and click okay. With that, we have room tags on both level 1 and level 2 power plans. Let's go back to level 1 now and zoom into our electrical room.

Now this tag could be cleaned up a little bit by dragging it into the room and we're ready to model our electrical equipment but this room is pretty small in this view so we want to do a call out view and enlarge the electrical room. To do that, we'll go back to our view tab and we want to select the call out button and we'll draw a rectangle around our electrical room and that creates a call out view. We can find it right here in our electrical floor plans.

It's called L1 power plan call out 1. It's kind of a mouthful so we'll rename this. Right click rename and we'll simply call this electrical room. Once it's renamed, let's double click that electrical room and we open it up.

Now it's still a pretty small scale, 1 8th inch. I want to click down at the bottom left 1 8th and change that scale and I want to bring it up to 1 half inch equals a foot. Then we can do ZE on our keyboard to zoom into that room and it's at a nice big scale.

I can adjust a few things, maybe make sure I can see the doors and all of the room in its entirety. Now that I have my electrical room, I can add the equipment and one thing that can help me is my project browser. All that analytical model that we created, we can open that up and use it as a cheat sheet to model our equipment.

Let's go up to view user interface and turn on our system browser and we want the electrical analytical systems and we can expand those out. We've got our utility transformer, our main switchboard and I think that's enough to see for now. Let's bring it over to see a few more bits of information and we'll move over our floor plan as well.

We notice that the power is coming in and we have our main switchboard or main distribution board. That is where we want to start our modeling. Revit really kind of concerns itself with the work that's happening primarily inside the building.

It doesn't really care about the utility or transformer outside. We're going to start here with that switchboard. To find the equipment in Revit, we're going to go back to our systems tab.

We will look across and we'll find electrical equipment. Click that button and the first bit of equipment we want is our switchboard. It's called utility switchboard and there is a main distribution board and that's what we want.

Main distribution board. As we hover into our electrical room, we can place it along the top wall and where my cursor is in this case is pretty much the back side of that distribution board. I'll click up near that top wall one time and I've got it.

There's my main distribution board. Just that simple. Now inside or being served by that main switchboard, we have my panel boards.

One, two, three, four. Those can go along this wall. I'm going to go back to my systems browser and I want electrical equipment.

I'm going to go ahead and select a panel board. I've got several panel boards here. Lighting and appliance.

Which one do I want? I want this surface. If you recall, we set those to 200 amps. We want 200 amp surface panel boards.

Lighting and appliance, 208 volt surface panel board. Now because they're surface boards, I can place them right on this wall and I want four of them. I'll click one, two, three, four times and I'll leave some space in between.

Something like that. I've got my four panel boards. Let's click the modify tab and before we go on, let's get organized.

We'll click the first panel board and scroll down and look at its properties here. We can see its schedule level is schedule level one. Elevation is four feet, so it's four feet off the ground and that looks good.

Let's continue on down. Under identity data, we have mark and we can call this PB1 and hit ENTER. Phase created looks good and then we want the panel name also to be PB1 and that stands for panel board one.

Enter. We'll scroll down. Everything else looks pretty good for now, so we'll leave that there.

Let's click the next one and do the same process. We'll simply look at the properties and we want the mark to be PB2 this time and we want to set the name to PB as well. PB2.

Now the third one, panel name, you're getting the pattern here PB3 and the mark will also be PB3. The fourth one, we can do panel name PB4 and mark PB4. Perfect.

Let's also apply a name to our main distribution board. We'll do a couple things here. Number one, the panel name, we'll call it main distribution board and for the mark, we can call this MDB for main distribution board.

All right, our electrical room is looking really good. We need to add a transformer down here. We have that step up transformer.

Let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to go back to my systems tab and I'm going to look for electrical equipment and pull this down. I can type in the word transformer to search.

Now I have a dry type transformer and that is for indoors for Revit dry type. I can take a look at my cheat sheet here. This is 15,000 VA, which if we add the K, the K stands for 1,000, KVA.

We can drop off three zeros. It would be 15 KVA transformer. We can pick that 15 KVA, pretty small little transformer here.

I noticed that my cursor is on the back of the transformer. I can hit the space bar and space bar again to set the back against the wall. There's my transformer.

Sometimes we have to upsize our transformer. If I'd like to, I can even go back and make this a 30 KVA transformer, space bar, space bar. Now I can click to place it.

There's my transformer. I'm going to click on the modify, select this transformer for now. Let's go ahead and give it a name as well.

Panel name, we'll call this transformer and scroll down. I think everything else looks pretty good for now. Scroll to the top.

We've got the mark. We can call it TR for transformer. I think with that, we're all set.

We do want it on level one with no offset. It looks really good. We have our electrical room.

Now we can add our elevation tags and a room tag. Let's start with the room tags. Let's go up to annotate and we'll go to room tag.

We want to tag this electrical room. I'll put the tag a little closer to the door to give us more space in the room. Click one time and modify.

Now I want my elevations. To do that, I go to the view tab, go to elevation and click the elevation button. I'm going to click right in the center of the electrical room.

Click one time, back to modify, and I'll select this elevation head again. I'll check the box for the lower elevation and check the box for the upper elevation. I've got three elevations total.

Now let's click on the first one. Just click on it one time and we can adjust the crop. We want to That looks pretty good.

Let's repeat that process. We'll go to number two. That one's pretty far out there.

We want to drag this in. I don't want to split through the equipment. I want to pull it back so I'm looking at the sides of the equipment.

I'll pull this dot back as well to crop it just to the electrical room. Repeat the process for the top one. Pull this in just the electrical room.

I'm looking pretty good now. Now let's go back to the bottom one. We'll click it one time and we have its properties right here on the left.

Let's double check the properties. Half inch scale. That is fine.

If I scroll down, I can find the name. It's under identity data. Right now it's called elevation 1D.

I want to rename that and I want to call this electrical room elevation 1. Perfect. Now I'll do that for the second one here that points to the left. I'll call this electrical room elevation 2. The top one can be electrical room elevation 3. Awesome.

Now that I have those elevations, we can find them here by scrolling down, finding elevations, interior elevation, and here are the three. I'll double click on elevation 1 and I can pull the crop down. Make sure we don't crop any higher than level 2. Go to elevation 2 and we'll repeat that same process.

Pull the crop down no higher than level 2. Elevation 3, again, grab that crop region and drag it down so we're no higher than level 2. You can also bring the bottom up a little bit as well. With that, we're in great shape. We have all of our equipment in the electrical room.