Plamen Hristov, the Director of Design Technology at Capital Engineering Consultants, has aggressively pursued mastering the Revit MEP data model. Below is a transcript from a recent chat between Plamen and Director of Ideate Software, Glynnis Patterson on the topic of a solution for editing specified power and lighting loads in Revit using Ideate BIMLink.
GP: Plamen, you called Ideate Software technical support recently asking if it would be possible to edit the Specified Power and Specified Lighting properties via Ideate BIMLink. Can you give us some background on why these fields are important to your work?
PH: At Capital Engineering we are always looking for ways to automate tedious tasks and processes as well as push the boundaries of Building Information Modeling. In this case we wanted to extract as much data as possible from a large healthcare facility Revit model and use it as a starting point for our load calculations in Trane Trace. The project has over 1000 spaces and usually doing the takeoffs and recreating such model in Trane Trace can take several days. Once the data is extracted and processed in Trane Trace and Excel, we wanted to populate the Revit model with it.
GP: Is this kind of task unique to that project type?
PH: No, it is not. Load calculations are an essential part of designing the mechanical systems and they are performed for every project.
Editing Space with Ideate BIMLink
GP: Initially these values were displaying as read-only properties in Ideate BIMLink but as you pointed out to us, it's easy to globally select the spaces and allow these values to be specified. Once that step is taken Ideate BIMLink can easily edit these properties as shown in the image above. Thanks for taking the time to share your expertise with us Plamen!
About the Author
Glynnis Patterson, NCARB - Director of Software Development Glynnis is a Registered Architect and has worked with the BIM industry since 1998. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, she has worked as an architect, educator and construction site manager. Glynnis is currently the Director of Software Development Services at Ideate, Inc. and continues to work with AEC clients across the nation, developing, and implementing best practices solutions. In her spare time Glynnis does volunteer work and builds Lego projects. @GVPinNJ