Picture of the second floor lighting plan
The project worksheets
Introduction
As my school semester comes to an end, I now look toward finding a job and (hopefully!) a career. This, of course, begs the question: what kind of work do I want to pursue? While this is a question I have been grappling with for a while, after having the opportunity to work with Traine Construction & Development for my Engineering Capstone Design Project, the answer has become apparent: engineering consulting! As someone who has always enjoyed designing spaces (think Minecraft), the prospect of working in a multidisciplinary team to develop residential, commercial, and industrial facilities is an extremely exciting prospect. To better acquaint myself with the industry, I took the time to leverage my Autodesk student licence while it still lasted and develop my Revit skills.
The Project
To learn how to use the electrical design side of Revit, I followed along an online course that uses an architectural model provided by Autodesk as a base. The goal was simple: while the architectural component of the project was complete, it was necessary to develop floor plans for lighting and power. As a preface, I am by no means a master in British Columbia’s electrical code, and largely followed the instructions outlined in the course material for matters such as receptacle placement. However, I look forward to learning more about the electrical code as I gain experience!
The residential project, courtesy of Autodesk
The Process
To begin the project, I created a project for the electrical work and proceeded to link the architectural models in. I aligned all of the levels in the electrical project to be the same as the architectural one, set up the grid lines, and tinkered with the view template and scaling.
After this, I began adding receptacles to the first and second floors, changing the appropriate settings to also allow me to tag the rooms. These tags included 2 phase receptacles for some kitchen/mechanical room loads.
For the living room, I had to set up a special plan region so the view range was correct, as the living room is at a different elevation compared to the rest of the first floor.
The first floor architectural floor plan
During the placement of the electrical receptacles, I noticed that large portions of the house were covered in floor-to-ceiling windows, making the use of wall-mounted receptacles impossible. To remedy this, I needed to create an electrically-connected floor receptacle using Revit’s Family Editor.
Following the placement of the electrical receptacles, I added in the electrical panel and began circuiting the house, adding tags to the home runs. At the same time, I created the panel schedule. Fortunately, Revit takes care of the load calculations.
Some of the family planner work performed during the scope of the project, including a custom pendant lighting fixture and a ground outlet. Additionally, I used Revit’s CAD capabilities to develop a simple single-line diagram.
After laying out the circuits for the house, it was time to develop the lighting plan and create the lighting schedule. While placing the lights for the first floor was relatively straightforward, because the second floor had vaulted ceilings, I had to create a custom hanging pendant light if I wanted to have any hanging lights (without importing custom families, of course). This was a good opportunity to experiment with Revit’s Family Editor, and I was able to create a simple linear lighting fixture. The neat part of this fixture is that if you adjust the settings correctly, you can turn the light from a rectangular shape with two supporting cables to a square shape with just one supporting cable, which affords additional flexibility. Such dual use can be seen on the second floor lighting plan (page E02 of the above PDF).
Following the circuiting of the lighting, the last major step of the project was the electrical site plan. Before I could start on this, I had to rotate the host view to align with the architect view. Following this, the electrical site plan included placing an outdoor luminaire for the provided parking space, placing conduits between the house’s solar array/electrical panel, and connecting a transformer to the house’s utility meter/electrical panel. This last series of connections was represented in the above single-line diagram.
Once all of this was done, I created a symbol diagram showing the major symbols used in the project and finally finished the project by placing everything onto a series of sheets, which are viewable via the PDF at the beginning of the article.
Moving Forward
While the process of getting Revit to work on my computer and actually learn the program took up a bit of time, it was time well spent; Revit is a powerful program. I look forward to further improving my skills in electrical design and am excited to work with other disciplines (such as with mechanical or civil engineers) on real-life projects!