Layout Plumbing Fixtures and How You Can Up Your Revit Game

Revit Layout Plumbing Fixtures

    They may not look like much, but our “Layout Plumbing Fixture” families will change the way you use Revit forever if your an MEP designer, drafter, coordinator, or contractor. Let’s face it; we work in an architect driven industry where they work, and we have to follow. They get to choose the software, building layout (duh), and fixtures in any given project in most cases. In their Revit models, architects place the fixures and leave us to find a workaround for our piping and ductwork connection points. They are essentially leaving us with no way to calculate your design loads easily. If we place the fixtures in our model, we either have to turn them off before printing our deliverables or risk having double fixures appear in our documents (no Bruno). We created an object style in each of our fixtures called “Layout Fixture” in the Plumbing Fixture Categories that can be easily turned off before plotting with having to creatively filter out all the other plumbing fixtures.

Revit Layout Fixture-2d-Annotated

     A few years ago, I created a remedy for this and refined them to the near-perfect state they are now. Our “Layout Plumbing Fixtures”  are dimensional representations of the basis of design fixtures if you are the MEP engineer or from the project submittals for the contractors. These fixtures can be adapted to almost any fixture configuration and have real connection points for your pipe. What I like best about them after you place and pin them. I use them to keep the architect honest when they start moving the walls around and not telling us. This way you have a graphical representation of where the old fixes were without using the copy monitor tool and dealing with all those pop-up dialog boxes that no one looks at anyway.

Sleeves - No more measuring off side walls, just place and align.

Revit Layout-Fixture-Sleeves

     Not to mention how quickly you can place sleeves in the model for all your fixtures, especially the water closet and shower drains. As a contractor, how many times have you seen someone try to place a sleeve or tub box at the bathtub drain circle instead of where the waste and overflow drops down thru the slab. Additionally, with our angled reference lines at every floor set drain connection, it makes it a breeze to connect your pipe to them at standard plumbing angles such as 90, 45, and 22 1/2 degrees. Plus, getting an accurate fixture count for each floor or the entire project is easy and can be in seconds with our embedded scheduling parameters. No more trying to figure out how many right and left-hand tubs or water closets you need to order unless someone uses the mirror command, then bad things happen.

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