Electrical Wiring and Panel Schedules in Revit

Posted on 9th November 2016

Categorised as dynamo, revit, tutorial

Tagged with Dynamo, Dynamo Studio, dynamo tutorial, electrical wiring drawings, Revit, revit electrial wiring, revit families, revit family, revit mep, revit mep tutorial, revit tutorial, uk bim standards

Electrical Wiring and Panel Schedules in Revit – UK Industry Standard Adaptation

By Tassos, our Revit and Dynamo Expert

Electrical engineers, designers and technicians in the UK building industry that use Revit to develop electrical drawings and panel schedules, will quickly discover that the way Revit names and presents circuiting information is not the generally accepted UK convection #way L #phase/s.

The following article suggests an alternative that uses a shared parameter, an updated Wire Tag and Panel Schedule Template as well as a Dynamo Graph to update and present circuiting information on electrical plans and panel schedules that adheres to UK engineering practice.

To follow this tutorial you can download the required Revit and Dynamo files from Google Drive.

An electrical wiring floor plan view in Revit, in its most basic form, consists of Electrical Equipment elements to create and represent distribution panels. Electrical Fixtures for power outlets, Lighting Fixtures for lights, Light Devices for light switches, Electrical Circuits that define how fixtures and devices are connected/grouped together as well as which distribution panel serves them, Wires to create wiring on the plans and finally Wire Tags to annotate wiring with information such as distribution panel name, way and phase.

Wires include instance properties Panel and Circuits that are used to designate panel names and monitor circuit information.

Circuits’ values are automatically generated by Revit. These values can be controlled using the available options of Circuit naming instance parameter in the distribution panel that the specific wire belongs to. So, one can set that value to Panel Name, Prefixed, Standard, or By Phase, to control how Circuits’ property values in Wires will be generated.

If one selects By Phase, Revit will update Circuits with values that precede the circuit number/way on a distribution panel with the phase label. Phase labels are text values that can be set under the General section of Electrical Settings. These labels can be A, B, C per phase as is the case for US or R, S, T per phase usually used in Europe.

Using labels as such, Revit will populate Circuits’ values with A2, ABC1 or S5, RST3 for example. This is not however the generally accepted naming convention used in the UK. Circuits in UK follow the #wayL#phase/s presentation rule, so A2 should be named as 2L1, ABC1 as 1L123 for a 3 phase circuit and so on and that is how circuits and wiring on drawings need to be labelled.

Revit will also generate Panel Schedules and for that it uses Panel Templates to manage the information presented on them.

Panel Schedules use Electrical Circuits elements that have an instance property Circuit Number that is populated again by Revit, using the same process as the one for Wires Circuits’ above.

So, how do we make Revit present these values with the generally accepted UK convection?

We first need to create a new text type Shared Parameter, name it “Circuit ID” and place it under “Electrical – Circuiting” Parameter Group. The next step is to add “Circuit ID” shared parameter to a project or project template as a Project Instance parameter (Manage->Project Parameters->Add) and assign to Electrical Circuits and Wires Categories.

Now, we can use the “Circuit ID” shared parameter in Wire Tags to annotate Wires on drawings as well as Electrical Circuits on Panel Schedules.

The following dynamo graph will update Circuit Naming of all Electrical Equipment in the project to By Phase before proceeding to update the Circuit ID shared parameter on all Wires and Electrical Circuits as well.

Use the “Update Electrical Circuit IDs.dyn” dynamo graph and the accompanied “Electrical2-DefaultGBRENU.rte” to create and update electrical wiring drawings and panel schedules that conform to UK acceptable industry standards or update your existing projects with the Circuit ID shared parameter as described above and use the dynamo graph to update its values.

However, although the above template contains an updated Wire Tag that can be used to label Wires with values such as “P-A/3L2” you will need to update its definition on existing projects since you will create a new shared parameter.

If you have any questions about this tutorial please get in touch at info@bmarq.co.uk. If you are interested in Revit and Dynamo training courses make sure to visit bmarqtraining.co.uk.