How to Save a Million Dollars: Automate Mechanical-Design Calculations with Revit

BEN ROBERTS: OK, thank you, guys, for coming. I appreciate you giving up your time right at the end of the week just to find out how to save a million dollars. It's appreciated.

So this is my third time I've been speaking at AU. Some of the feedback I've heard last from previous sessions, which is very helpful, is that nobody can understand what I'm saying because of my strange accent. If you can't understand what I'm saying, you just have to say, you have to shout, what. Or if I mumble or whatever, just get me to speak up.

Can you guys hear me at the back? Yeah? Yeah. Cool. All right, what else was I going to say?

So you've probably noticed I haven't put any material up on the Autodesk website yet. This is because, and I did send a message out about this on the app, there's a limit of 25 megabytes and my presentation's significantly more than that. And I wanted to share a bunch of other materials, and the only format was PDF, for some reason.

So I wanted to share some Dynamo scripts and things, so I've put it all into Dropbox and my email address is, I've put it in the comments on the app. If you want the material, email me and I'll send you the Dropbox link. I'll take the Dropbox link out of the app but I think apparently there was some problem with that. So whatever, let me know.

Cool, so let's get going. I wanted to start with a little bit of context to kind of put the whole thing into perspective. Also because I'm sort of fascinated with doom and misery, I wanted to bring everything down a little bit to get started.

So why are we here? What's the point? If we keep living our lives in this way, there's going to be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. Animal agriculture is responsible for 91% of Amazonian deforestation and more greenhouse gas emissions than all of transports. And the rich-poor divide is getting worse and worse. Just eight men own the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the whole world. So there's some pretty serious things going on.

And my point is this is stuff I think we should be doing something about. We should be aware of these issues and we should be fixing them. And instead, we don't. We haven't got enough time because, obviously, we're spending all of our time typing the same numbers into schedules and not using the most efficient processes. It's not a tenuous link, is it?

So miserable, miserable. What we really need to be doing is painting a better vision of the future, creating an idea of a world that we could be living in. So this isn't my own picture, I just nicked it off of Google somewhere, but ever since I found the image I've shaped my whole life around, let's make a world like this. So this is kind of, again, the context is where I'm trying to go with all this.

And what does this mean for us in the construction industry, in the built environment? And I think some of the things that we've seen in the keynotes is about this strong message, actually, that I really like about automation and robotics and things, not actually getting rid of people's jobs but giving us an opportunity, giving us more time to focus on the things that we really want to do. And so hopefully, I'm a mechanical engineer, these are some of the things that I would like to be doing and often don't have enough time because I'm spending too much time doing detail, which is actually not where a lot of the value is. So when we're doing detailed design, actually the reason we're spending loads of time there is often creating production information or doing fiddly, inefficient administrative processes. So ideally, we'd like to be spending a lot more time up front, playing around with the concepts, and, of course, an awful lot more time in the in the kind of latter stages.

So I should probably introduce myself because some of you are probably thinking the sound technician's a bit up himself. So I'm actually a mechanical engineer, I'm a chartered engineer. My job title is BIM Delivery Leader, so these days I'm responsible for rolling out BIM and Revit for our business. I work for Hoare Lea, we're an MEP consultancy based in the UK and the Middle East. And we have just under 1,000 staff.

In the interest of reusing information, that's my email signature, that's from Instagram, and that's from Twitter. So there we go, that's me. So that's enough of that.

The actual presentation I'm going to do, I'm going to dip in and out of PowerPoint. Do you want to come in and find-- There's quite a few seats around, if you want to find a seat. You don't have to.

So I'm going to dip in and out of the PowerPoint. I'm going to try and do as much as I can with actually live demonstrations in Revit model and show you the whole process in Revit. Hopefully, that will help to like pick up a few little tips and tricks. And also if you have questions as you go, then-- I'm playing around in the Revit model, so I don't mind diverting a little bit.

I'm hoping to have a little bit of time at the end for some questions, before 5 o'clock. 5 o'clock is happy hour so I'm definitely leaving at 5:00, but I hope to have a little bit of time at the end for questions. But as I'm saying, if there's anything that's not clear or you want to ask questions as you go, that's cool. I actually prefer a little bit of conversation, otherwise it's just me talking for an hour and a half or whatever. So not very interesting.

So here we go, heating design workflow. I've kind of chopped it into four main sections. So adding spaces into a model, using Revit for heating loads, terminals and pipes, actually drawing the system and then playing around with the system sizing and some color schemes and schematics and things. The output from this is going to be these things.

So we're going to end up with a three-dimensional model that's sized and it's got the data in it. We're going to produce some room data sheets and treatment plans. We'll have pipework layouts, we'll have schematic layouts and color schemes, equipment schedules, bills of quantities. So that's what we're going to get out of it.

So breaking those four sections down each into five steps, so we have a handy 20-step process for doing mechanical design. And what I've shown is the red dotted lines. I've got Dynamo scripts, so there are two Dynamo scripts that I use here.

And one of the feedback things I heard from last year was a lot of people wanted to steal my Dynamo scripts, which is cool. So they are on the Dropbox thing. I will share them with you so you can have those after the session.

There's a few instances where we've-- I have a couple of software developers on my team, and we've played around with the API and made a few little tools ourselves, add-ins ourselves. None of it that we've done is particularly unusual. There's loads and loads of third party providers out there in the exhibit hall who are doing very similar things.

But actually, most of it is just core Revit functionality. So even without Dynamo and without any add-ins, most of what I'm going to show you is just normal Revit. OK.

So before I get started, does anyone have any questions or comments, like, is anyone in the wrong room or expecting something completely different? Cool. Right. Clear as day.

So Spaces. Step 1 was actually setting up the model. I'm not going to do this because it's probably quite boring for you to just watch me linking in a Revit model and things. But that's what I've done for step 1.

And then my next trick is I'm going to use Dynamo to add my Spaces and pull in their room names across from the architecture model. I'm going to use a Excel data link to pull the space data across. I'm going to create some color scheme treatment plans and export some room data sheets.

So the presentation, incidentally, has a video of me doing all of that, but I'm going to hopefully-- OK, yeah. Rock and roll. Hopefully, I'm going to get through all of this live.

So something I can't remember if I had this year or not, but Dynamo player now exists, which is great. So those are my two Dynamo scripts I'm going to use for this session. This is the model I have that's really three stories, or floors.

So I have a Spaces view here, and all I'm going to do is run my Dynamo script. And what this is doing is it's just looking in the links model, finding rooms, and then putting a space wherever there's a room. It's inheriting the offset height, that's inheriting the room name and the room number. It usually takes about 10 or 20 seconds, so because I'm doing a live demo, it's probably going to be like three minutes.

And it's kind of too soon to start asking questions, right?

AUDIENCE: What's the reason for not using the out-of-the-box tool to [INAUDIBLE]?

BEN ROBERTS: OK, good question. So the question is, why can't I just use the out-of-the-box tool for Spaces? So I can do that, and what that will do is on each floor it will automatically add spaces, right? Well

AUDIENCE: You can select levels, individual or all of them, and you can add spaces to the newest space [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: OK, yep. Yep. So the process prior to doing this would be to go on level 0 and then set an upper limit and add spaces automatically, and it would fill the floor and I'd had to do that on each level, right?

AUDIENCE: No, you can select multiple levels at the same time.

BEN ROBERTS: Is this true? OK, this is good. I'm learning. How did you do that?

AUDIENCE: Spaces and Houses. Find Spaces [INAUDIBLE]. You have a section for Spaces?

BEN ROBERTS: Here?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, and then Add Spaces Automatically?

BEN ROBERTS: Yeah, but this is only going to do it for one floor.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: Yeah, yeah. So there is this tool, the Space naming thing. So yeah for this, I can then just pull the names across the whole thing. So that will do all my naming for the whole building in one go, which is great. So I don't really need Dynamo for that.

But yeah, what it won't do is actually place the spaces for me. And the other thing that's useful about this is because the rooms have already been set up with the right heights and going all the way to the top of the building. And then if I look in Section--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] too. That [INAUDIBLE] gives you the ability to only grab [INAUDIBLE]. So if you're working in a [INAUDIBLE], you could model the entire floor. If you're only working in half a building, if you use Place Space Automatically, it will push it's spaces into every possible spot. Your Dynamo script, [INAUDIBLE] is probably a better process.

BEN ROBERTS: OK. OK, good.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: Thanks. Cool. Thank you. Also, I'm sure that you guys in this room will know things that are better than some of the things that I'll show you. So I'd really appreciate it if you do highlight things, and then next time I do this presentation I can take the credit. Thanks.

Yep, so there we go. So I've got my spaces in, and where there's like an atrium or it goes across different floor slabs, then it's just picked that up from the rooms. So I don't have to mess around pulling the upper limits of levels off of things.

So once I've got my spaces in, I can schedule them out. So another thing, I do have like-- I'm sure you have this-- we have a company template, and there's a bunch of predefined schedules in here. So I can make a new schedule or I just use this one here.

So I've got a list of spaces and then a whole bunch of different parameters. And to populate this manually is obviously quite time consuming. So we're going to use a tool for putting the data across from Excel.

So I have an Excel spreadsheet of all my different space types, and then here is those parameters again. Actually, I think there's more parameters in here than my Revit thing, but pre-populated with types. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to assign a type to each of my individual spaces, and then use the tool to pull that through.

So actually I'm going to do that the other way around. We have a Data Link tool. We actually have a few different options, but this one is like a dynamic relational thing and fairly straightforward. I just find the Excel sheet that I want to map to, pull out the table from the Excel sheet that I want to use, and then find the parameters.

So in this case, I've actually used something called Uniclass codes. I'm not going to use Uniclass descriptions, actually. And so in the UK, we have Uniclass, you guys have Omniclass, MasterFormat number, and things like that. Maybe you have project specific naming standards.

It doesn't have to be that, it could just be your own parameter that says space type or whatever. It doesn't really matter. I've used Uniclass just because in the UK, it's an industry standard.

So I'm just mapping the column in the Excel table and the column in the Revit link. And then what that means is when I then choose, say, reception as reception areas, and then that's going to look at the Excel link and pull the values across. So it's just going to populate more of the list.

So with this method, I still have to go down and do this one by one. There's a few little tricks. So one is, you see there's quite a few unisex toilets. I know in this country you call them restrooms or bathrooms, we're terribly coarse in the UK and refer to them as toilets.

So if I use this Sorting feature, and then this tiny little tick box at the bottom is kind of life changing, I find. Itemize Every Instance, what it will do is it will just group everything together by one row at a time. So I go down to that unisex toilets, and I only have to then do this once and it'll apply the data for everything that's in that group.

So there's a couple of different ways you can do that. You can select a bunch of spaces and then do Highlight and Model, and it will pull them up in the view. And then you could type in the properties down here. It's another sneaky way of doing the same thing. But this still involves manually going through and adding things in. So we wanted to go one step better.

And we've worked with our architect. So I've got my architectural model here, and in their rooms. Again, this is something in the UK, they have to do this as Uniclass, so we've got Uniclass codes for each of the rooms. But it doesn't have to be that. Again, it could be room type, as long as you agree a parameter that everybody's using, that's cool.

So I'm going to use the parameter from the room rather than the parameter in the space. So I go back into my same tool again. So as I say, this is our own tool that we made ourselves but it's pretty similar to a lot of other tools that are out there.

So this time, instead of the space, I'm going to take a parameter from the room. Uniclass code, OK. And I'm just going to push the update on that. So this is good because then I don't have to do any of that manual thing of saying, oh, a bedroom is a bedroom or an office is an office. OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: Yeah, that's right. So the question was, are all of the apps something that we've made in-house. Yeah, we have this Hoare Lea Ribbon, so we've just made a bunch of these things ourselves. Yeah and, you know, I'm more than happy later if anyone's interested, I'm happy to walk you through some of the other add-ins as well that we've made to save a bunch of time. I'm covering a couple of them in today's class.

So anyway, there we go. It did what we expected it to do, and now it's full. So now we've got a whole bunch of data brought into the model very, very quickly. So this is one of the more significant areas of time saving.

And once we've got that, obviously, we can start to make color schemes. So actually what I'll do is I'll create some new views. I just need those three levels. And if I go and find them up here, I just apply some View Templates.

So I can apply Treatment Plans individually, color schemes, I should say. I could apply color schemes individually, but what I've done is I've set up some View Templates in the Company Template. So heating strategy, for example. And then I just have to apply that, and hey, presto.

Do you say that in America, hey, presto? Yeah? OK, and then a little legend outside of the view. So again, this has been a standard feature in Revit for a while but really useful time saving.

So the great thing about having my data linked directly is if anything changes then in the architecture model, then this stuff is all just going to update straight away because I've got a dynamic link. So I don't need to worry about going and keeping up to date. So it's pretty quick to make this stuff, but then when the stuff changes, this is very powerful because it just changes along with it. Maybe that's terrifying.

And so there's only one other thing that I've got to do with the spaces. And again, this is like a data link thing. Rather than setting up a dynamic link, I can just export. So we've created-- I just save them on the desktop-- just like a standard room data sheet. And do I want to open it? Yeah.

And so it will just create a bunch of room data. So these are like room data sheets for every individual space in the model. So you can see down at the bottom there, there's like, I don't know, however many hundreds of spaces there are, each populated with data.

So a quick and handy way of doing that, I think. And so, quite a bit time saving there at the earlier stages before we actually start modeling systems. So that's my Spaces thing, and what I've just shown you is pretty much exactly what's in the video there that's is in the presentation.

So heat loads, so this is the process that I've got, but I'll go through. We have to define the thermal properties of the constructions and the architectural model, we have to set the energy settings in our model, create an analytical model, and bring the results back, and then our schedules for checking their densities. So there's disclaimers about this.

So I'm using Insight360, which is great. How many people have used Insight360, like at all, for early stage conceptual things? Yeah, a few? Cool. So it's a brilliant tool for the initial massing and getting an idea of your energy loads and things like that, and wasn't really originally designed to do this. But this is what I want it to do because it does, it can actually create heating and cooling loads for spaces.

So at the moment, there's a few little quirks that you've got to be aware of. I've listed them out here. I'm not going to go through every bullet point in detail. You can keep slides.

Yeah, there's a few little quirks that I'm hoping to iron out. So, you know, next year, hopefully this won't be here. But yeah, like I say, Insight360, it's intended as an initial massing tool, not really intended for this but it's actually pretty good and the workflow works quite nicely.

So here we go, this is it. This is the workflow. So if I grab my architectural model. In fact, not a window, bad example. So if I grab a wall, for each of my different wall types, there's the structure that's in here.

And for each material we have to make sure that we have this Thermal tab added. So by default, this will be switched off so you won't get the thermal properties. You just have to add this tab in and then you can go into the materials database. All this is loaded in, anyway, and it will pull through your conductivity and specific heat and density bodies and all of these things.

So we have to go through and do this for each of the materials. So again, collaborate with your architect, work on getting these values in so that you're happy with the materials that are being used because that's what is going to go into the energy analysis.

AUDIENCE: Are you able to then schedule [INAUDIBLE]?

BEN ROBERTS: That's a good question. So the question is are we able to schedule that material data, the thermal properties? In the model, it's a check. Does anyone know the answer?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you should be able to do it in either model. Yeah, I'll have a look in here seeming as I'm in here. But it will be the same in either, right?

So, what would you do, schedule the wall? Yeah? No. The answer is no. OK.

So you know the website, Revit Ideas? Has anyone heard of Revit Ideas? Yeah. So search for that, type it in. Revit Ideas, you should be able to schedule it up the materials. You'll get at least-- how many people are here-- 60 likes. That's pretty good.

Yeah, I mean, that's a good point because to review it you have to actually click on each individual element. I go through on a one by one basis. Same deal for everything else like all the floors and everything. Actually there's something wrong with that floor, it's a bit weird. So you have to go through that process for making sure that the materials are fine. Actually, there's a couple of different ways you can use the materials within the energy settings, but that's the more accurate way of doing things.

So on to analyze. So this was Insight360, it's now built into Revit so you should see these energy optimization things. The energy settings are like this.

This is what I've just shown you about using the elements in the architectural models. That's used building elements. Or you can do it with conceptual masses, or both. You have to set ground plane, project phase.

And there's a few settings in here for building types. So building type affects your occupancy levels and lighting levels and heat gain and that sort of thing. Similar with HVAC systems, there's a bunch of predefined, assumed values that are going be applied to your analysis.

Outdoor air information, I find, is an interesting one because there are actually three different places you can provide this. You can provide it in the space, zone, or in these settings here, which I think is a little confusing, if I'm honest. But that's one of the energy settings here. And you have to tell it whether you're exporting spaces or rooms. and

If you didn't want to use the detail elements, so if you don't want to use the architectural model, there are other options. So there's these schematic types, so you might want to overwrite them with these predefined constructions in here. So there's more of a schematic-y style.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: This one here? So the comment was, is--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: Oh, OK, right. So this is either air changed per hour or outdoor air per hour or-- And are you saying, is it capable of doing-- I think I know what you mean.

What's the quick way to get to the Space settings? So I know this one, like this Outdoor Air Method that they have in Spaces. So you can do this by people and by area, or air changes per hour, or the maximum people and the area, or the maximum of people and area and air changes per hour. Is that--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BEN ROBERTS: Sorry?

AUDIENCE: They must have just added that recently.

BEN ROBERTS: Yeah, it is a recent feature. I think it came in 2018 or 2017, one or something. It's a relatively recent feature. There you go. Glad I could help.

OK, so that's the extent of the energy settings, really, in a nutshell. And then you can just run an analytical model. So this is going to upload it. Oh, I didn't check my internet connection.

So this is actually going to upload to the cloud, it's going to run cloud analysis, and then it's going to send the results back. It gives you a little email to say that it's received to the model, and then gives you another email to say that your results are finished. Generally, with this model and from times I've done it, it usually takes about 10 minutes. So I'm going to skip onto the next section to show you building up the systems, and then we'll bring the heating loads back in and then we can push them into the families and see what impact it has.

So again, that's all in the presentation in this video. Cool. So I'm halfway through and I haven't actually put anything physical in the model. I haven't actually modeled any systems yet, so probably time to put some things in.

I'll show you a few different techniques for placing terminals, for connecting up to pipes, and connecting up your systems. I have a note about coordination because it's obviously a massive sticky point. And it is like the number one thing that we suggest to a lot of our teams is, you have to do this in advance. Create a section and measure all of these heights so that you know where stuff's going to go. It sounds like a really obvious common sense but apparently not.

So we do this and then we know what out offset heights are going to be for the parts going down the corridor. So I'm going to check some terminals and pipes in the model. I'm going to connect the terminals back to my main pipes and I'm going to use a new feature in 2018, Analytical Pipe Connectors, because it's super quick and great.

I'm going to put formulae into the family. So automatically resize and calculates the flow rate from the heating load. I've got some equipment schedules, I say equipment schedules-- they're already in my template, right? And then I'm going to pull the space loads back into the terminals. I may do things slightly out of order, but something like this. So again, there's the video. And where is it life? Here we go.

So I'm just going to work on the north part of the building. So I've set my-- I'm just going to put radiators in. I've set my radiator family up so that it's offset 50 mil from the wall, 50 millimeters, two inches, from the wall. That is actually a parameter in here. So if you wanted it to be-- somewhere. It's in there somewhere. If you wanted it to be further. Huh?

Oh, great. That is because-- thank you for letting me know. That would have been really boring for everyone.

[LAUGHTER]

This is my favorite beach. How's that? There we go. Cool. Let's do that again. So I'm going to put some radiators in. Yeah, I've set the radiator up to 50 mil away from insertion point, two inches away, just so that I can just click on the wall. Once I put the first one in, they'll kind of line up anyway, but where you've got a wall that sticks out.

I mean, just click on the wall, rather than having to insert it on the wall and then manually offset it. I don't know if people do these things. I'm throwing them in fairly arbitrarily now, and they have like a default size obviously. Let's put three in here. Maybe I'll just mirror those, actually. And I'll stick a few double panels along this one here.

Yeah, that should do. So I put my terminals. It's kind of probably the opposite way around to what you'd really do, because really you'd put your main pipes in down the corridor first. We can pretend to do it that way. So when you put your terminals in, check the pipe type. In our case, that's the material. The reference level, sometimes it just defaults to like, the previous reference level, which is really annoying.

And check, obviously, the offset system type. I'm going to do low temperature hot water flow. And then I'll put the return in afterwards. And obviously, the size. So we don't know what the size is yet. And we've probably done some initial stage kind of guesswork. I'm going to say-- I'm just going to put in like a 40 mil pipe. It doesn't really matter. We're going to resize it all later anyway.

So I'm just going to bang a couple of pipes down there and then I'll join them up into the riser. So there's a flow and a return. And I'll just take off here into the riser. And when I got the riser, I just kind of changed the offset and drew another pipe on the level above, and it will just put the riser in for me. So a quick way of doing things. You can either do like a normal offset or parallel pipes.

In fact, so if I just do an offset, it will only those two pipes there. So I'm going to use the parallel pipe feature. If you hit tab, and you can kind of see it with that blue dotted line. It's actually doing the floor above as well. So slightly more useful. I don't need these. I want it to be a return system. And I want a trim it into here. I'll just drag it in, maybe. Cool.

So at the moment, I've got open ends here. So if I select the pipes, cup open ends, and then I can start joining things in. So there's a few different ways we can join things in. My favorite way at the moment is with analytical connectors because it's kind of this easy-- if I just select-- so I'm going to join all of these, so these pipes and then that one is really inconvenient, like halfway across here.

You'll see what I mean in a moment. And maybe I'll grab these as well. Oh, yeah. Actually another thing I quite often do, when you select these, it's really easy to pick up spaces and actively grab spaces and space tags around things. And so I quite often just select on my spaces and pin them. And use the little button at the bottom to not select pinned elements. And then it just makes things a bit tidying.

So then I can kind of grab all of those in one go without picking up spaces by accident. Kind of useful. And so how many people have used analytical connectors in Revit 2018? Nobody? This is great. You're going to love this. So this is how easy it is. You select your terminals. There's a button up here, analytical connections, and then you just tell it where you want it to go. So I'm going to join them all into these two pipes. Those are the flows. Those are the returns.

And it's just drawn in this dotted line. So the analytical connections, so they're not physical pipes, hasn't done-- hasn't rooted anything anywhere, but it is passing the information from the terminal into the pipe. So I can see here, if I put a little tag-- so it's picking up the flow rate. I'll come back to where it's getting flow rate from in a moment.

So pretty quick and handy way of making sure that you can still size your main equipment without having to draw all the tiny little 15 mil-- what's that? Half inch pipes? Is that what you go to radiators? Half inch? Yeah? Sure. Yes. And then I'll just connect these ones in here. So this one will go out across at a funny angle, maybe. And it kind of knows flows and returns.

And so I just want to check down here in that last pipe. Yeah. That's cool. So I'm picking up a flow rate all the way down here, which is great. So that's why analytical pip connectors are amazing, because that quickly I've now got a connected system. And if anything changes in my terminals, then that's passing back up to the upper riser.

If I go up to the level above, I'll see there's these two pipes. So let's get rid of the things I don't want to see, hide the ventilation and--

AUDIENCE: Did you say analytical pipe connection? Is that what you're doing?

BEN ROBERTS: Yes. Analytical connections. So at the moment in Revit, they work for hydronic systems. Not yet for domestics or duct-work, but I'll show you that again. So disconnect it. So when you select the element, you'll see this button now in 2018. Analytical connections. So it's that one there. I've just gone up to the floor above. I'm just going to add in a boiler here and just connected it.

Have the liberty of having one item of plan in a rather large planned space, so coordination's not too much of an issue, but it makes the demo quicker. I'm just going to place it randomly. And for this-- so I can use analytical connections for the main pump as well, but for the primary pump, you're probably more likely to want to use-- to want to actually have the pipes in there.

So I'd just use connect into as well, so fine for pipework-- connect into is really useful. So connect into flow, connect in to return. It works quite well. Fine for duct-work. It's kind of not so good, doesn't do flexible connections and things like that. But whatever. Maybe that's why I'm doing pipework. So I've connected up my boiler there. I'll put a little tag on it. Oh, yeah.

So we all know about this thing, right? This is one of the add-ins we've made is-- the mock parameter just picks up like the last piece of mechanical equipment you did. So that was one of the little updates that we did. There you go. So it just changes it from route to BB. We're not like selling the tool or anything, but maybe it just gives you an idea, like if you have the capability yourselves that maybe it's a feature that you might be interested in. I don't know.

Anyway, that was a diversion. That's what I really wanted to show you. So I've just created a tag that's showing me what's the total-- what's the mark and what's the total load that's connected to that. I'll come back to how that's converting. It's converting from flow rate into heating lead. I'll come back to that in a moment.

So I'm all connected up. What else do I need to do here? Yes. I'll come back to that right now. So I've got some formula in the families, right? So I go into my radiator family and I'm calculating a couple of things. I've got-- there's a few formula in here that are just for size, like pipe radius times two. Fun stuff-- which you don't have to do anymore actually, but it's an old family, so I do.

And I've got to two formula that are worth checking out-- so LTHW flow rate the items for water flow rate, is fairly straightforward. And the output divided by a specific heat capacity times the temperature difference. So simple enough. And it just means that whenever I change my heat, after it will update the flow rate, though it's like, not enough decimal places. So it just means that all that changes.

So that's a fairly straightforward one. You have to be careful with units, so times one liter per second on the end, because otherwise it would have been a number. But yeah, that's the kind of work around for canceling out units. The other one I've done is actually the length of the radiator. So overall length is a function of the heat output, divided by this water per meter value.

So I've created a water per meter value in here and the former I actually took from manufacturer's data. So they have this. Based on the height, this is the water per meter output that you get from the radiator. So just poured it into x-o, created a graph, added a trend line and an equation. And then I just took that equation and used it in here. So it just means that it will resize itself based on the heat output and the height and the depth of the radiator.

I don't need to load it back in, because I haven't actually changed anything. So I've got that. So we'll see this in the next step when I push the heating loads into the radiator. They'll change the size. They'll change the flow rates into the pipes and into the connectors, and because everything's connected, it will pass through the system. All right.

So I'm doing all these amazing complicated computational things, and then I get to close the window and I get the little blue circle of patience. It just goes and has a cup of tea every now and then, doesn't it?

[LAUGHTER]

And it's hard to find a cup of tea in America. So it has to go for a longer time. All right. Go back in the room. I have a similar equation in the boiler actually, so that's how it's working out that kilowatt value. It's actually just doing the opposite of the flow rate thing from before. So it's inheriting the flow rate from the system and inheriting the flow rate from the system and then just dividing it by-- sorry, multiplying it by specific heat capacity and the temperature difference.

So hopefully fairly straightforward. This is going to take ages again. So yeah, that way everything that's coming back through the system is going to update on my boiler, so I know what the load is going to be all the time. I've got-- now that I've put the equipment in, I've got some equipment schedules. So again, these are just default in our company templates.

I use a filter so it filters out by the type mark, because it only shows that things that the type mark have read. And there's not much more to say about that really. All the parameters are kind of already populated. The flow rate values here and the length and the output. So we're going to see all of those things change in a minute. We're building the suspense up for that well, right?

Before I bring the heat loads back in-- so what's this rogue thing? See you later. So before I bring the heat loads back in, I'm just going to do step one of the next stage. So I'll go back to my PowerPoint. So this is the final part, part four, which is good news. We still have 45 minutes before happy hour.

And this is the final thing I want to do. So I'm going to make some schematic style layouts and some layouts with color schemes on. At that point, I'll run my little Dynamo script. I'll bring the heat loads back into the model and push them into the radiators. And then I'll use Revit for automatically sizing my pipes. We have our own little tool that adds the insulation so that it's all the right size for the right sizes.

And then I'll create a bit of quantities and you can see the topology. So we're pretty much nearly there actually. So I'm going to do that step one first, create some schematic and colored layouts. And let's just check whether it's actually happening on the screen. Cool. So currently Revit doesn't do schematics. Do you call them something different there? Do you call them line diagrams or something? Yeah? Schematics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Just checking. Just checking.

And I'm kind of quite a long way there already with this. You can see I've created this tag that just pulls out the size of the flow rate, the velocity, and the pressure drop. It says zero pascals per meter. It's just a rounding thing. It's actually just tiny, tiny. Zero point something. There you go, like 1 pascal a meter, that's very small. Should be like 200. It's just a big pipe.

So we can add these tags and then just simplify the background. That's terrifying. Hello.

[LAUGHTER]

Is it gone? All right. So yeah, we can simplify the backgrounds and it's already single line actually. I don't know whether people prefer to do the pope layout single line or double line, but whichever way around. A couple of things come to mind. So again, a quick way to view the template. And I've created some for-- what are we doing? Heating and cooling schematics.

So it just simplifies-- actually, it switches off the architectural model. If I wanted to see like room names, that might be quite useful. Just so you toggle-- and I tell you what. I'm going to jump ahead. And I don't have room. It shows me the heating load as well. So at the moment, these all have zero heating loads. It's all about to change.

So obviously this is not a normal schematic you're used to seeing, but given that it's so incredibly quick to make, this kind of-- you may as well do it anyway. It's very useful as a design checking tool and commissioning engineers find this stuff very useful because actually they know exactly where they are in the building rather than maybe having to guess slightly from a traditional schematic.

So maybe it replaces traditional schematics. Maybe it doesn't. But they're super quick to do and they're really helpful and useful. So I recommend doing these. Hi?

AUDIENCE: Can you show the valves on the end of the schematics--

BEN ROBERTS: Yeah. That's a good point. So I haven't actually modeled any on my equipment here. And we're going to see if I did put in a valve. So let's see. If I did put in a valve, then it kind of comes up sort of how it would look on plan view anyway, right? What we-- so we don't show all of our valves on the whole model. And we've got some notes in a minute about the total system pressure drops.

But we would just do like typical details really. And then we'd have to factor in. Seeing as you've asked, I'll kind of say this now. With the analytical connections, obviously because this doesn't know like, oh, there's a bunch of bends and T's and this length of pipe, you have to put in like a nominal pressure drop.

So on the analytical connector there, there's like edit type, pressure drop, and I've just said like 50 pascals notionally for each of those analytical connectors. And you can always duplicate types if you want it to have some that were like, heavier than others or whatever. So I think that answers your question until I factor in the pressure drop of this schematic of the system. That will be one way of doing it.

And then we would generally create typical details for like, valves in a legend, and then just show the legend on the side of it. You can do this for plans. You can also do this in section view and you can do it in 3D as well if you lock your 3D view, create an isometric, and you can do these nice tag things. I find with systems like this, isometrics are always a bit awkward because they are very horizontal. So it's a bit weird.

But if it works, if you have a nice small system or something, then you can do it. And the functionality is there. We tend to do a riser, cut through on the riser with these schematic tags in. And sometimes we will create that on the side of a sheet. And the riser, and also then the lay out. Just some ideas. You didn't have to. Oh yeah. What happened?

Yeah, when I applied to the view template, so it set up my view nicely so that it kind of looks simple. But it also moved it in the project browser as well. So printing views, mechanical, heating and cooling schematics. So I put it in the right place. The only thing I have to do manually is rename the view.

And I should have duplicated that view before I renamed it as well. That was pretty dumb, pretty bad practice. All right, cool. Let's see if the magic happened. So I haven't checked my e-mails. I don't know whether the heating analysis is done, but I'm kind of hoping so by now. Analyze. So when you've completed your Insight 360 analysis, you can use that to go online and do the kind of fun optimization stuff.