Focused: Electrical Calculations in Revit

My name is Ruslan, I am working as an Electrical Design Engineer. As usual, I am working with big residential and commercial buildings with a professional team. In my work, I use Revit for preparing plans, BOM, cable schedule, etc., and Excel for calculations and SLD.

Last year I decided to do a whole project, including calculations, in Revit, however without any external software and plugins to keep a model “clear”. So, I had many problems with this decision because Revit has a poor toolset to do calculations, especially for electrical loads.

But fortunately, this is not true, if you know to use Revit very well, because this program gives enormous possibilities to build what, we, the user wants by using a mix of different tools.

And I began experimenting...

In this article, I share my knowledge in solving the problems with doing calculations in Revit in the following chapters:

1. What we can do in Revit using “visible” tools;

2. What “invisible” tools we can use;

3. Conclusion.

1. WHAT WE CAN DO IN REVIT USING “VISIBLE” TOOLS

As a rule of thumb, working in Revit as a casual designer looks like this:

a. make some settings;

b. place electrical panels;

c. place consumers and connect them to the placed panels;

d. adjust circuit route and add rise/down length;

e. create or use template schedules of electrical circuits.

After these actions, you will receive the electrical circuit schedule list of the calculation parameters, but the wire size shown is not correct (not in EU form), also we cannot receive in this schedule demand factor and demand load, for this reason, we can use it only for consumers, for panels which consist of different types of loads, it does not work.