6 Common Issues Most Specialists Face When Designing Heating & Cooling Systems

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Designing piping systems in Revit can be quite a hassle. We have been talking with quite some MEP engineers and designers over the last months and found out that there are common issues for all of you. Pain points we’ve heard from specialists like you:

1. I am spending a lot of time changing systems in Revit from generic content to manufacturer specific content like pipes and valves.

You have received a model with a generic piping system from your consulting engineer that you want to change to a system from your preferred supplier. This can prove to be very difficult. Content provided by manufacturers does not match your actual system, the correct fittings are not available or autorouting preferences are not set within Revit. Making a generic system work for your specific project can take hours.

The manufacturer specific piping content in our recently published Product Line Placer for Piping App for Revit and Product Line Placer for Valves App for Revit work seamlessly with plain Revit content. Changing from generic to manufacturer specific systems will be a matter of seconds instead of hours.

2. Changing from one manufacturer to another manufacturer’s system is hard.

Did you just design a piping system for a specific manufacturer, but now your contractor decides to change to another supplier? Fear not, you will not have to design your entire piping system again. The Product Line Placer for Piping App allows you to just select another manufacturer and change the entire piping system, including fittings and bends. Using the ‘apply types’ function, you can be sure the new piping system is equipped with the correct product and trade information such as article number and GTIN.

3. I am tired of working with the pre-defined (limited) Revit options and rigidity.

Revit is a comprehensive tool offering a lot of functionalities. Too many functionalities to really work for you perhaps? Creating your own Revit library for piping systems, including autorouting settings, means really a lot of work. And what if manufacturers decide to change important technical details? You will have to set up a new library all over again and update all your custom made products. The Product Line Placer for Piping will do all of this work for you, pre-configuring autorouting settings and to equip piping systems with the correct bends and fittings, linked to the cloud-based MEPcontent database. No fiddling with your piping systems settings needed anymore.

4. I am searching for working, actual family packs and other BIM content all over the internet (ideally fabrication ready families).

Wow, there are quite some manufacturers and BIM platforms out there offering content for your MEP systems. The big problem? For some reasons, they all have different standards when it comes to the level of detail, connectors, naming and size. We know it’s important for you to work with content that is light, compact, that works for your entire project, but still has the right data attached to it. That is why we made sure our content is (manufacturer) data based. In this way, your systems will always be flexible and not have enormous, unnecessary levels of details. Still, you will have the right connectors, article numbers and deep links available within your project. Also, we made sure we added all relevant manufacturers to the Apps so you no longer have to go through endless hoops to download a single connector from a website you might not know very well. Are you missing a manufacturer? Let us know and we’ll try to add it to our app as well.

5. I am facing issues connecting piping systems with other equipment such as valves and pumps.

Having a decent piping system is one, but obviously, you have to add valves, pumps to it and connect it to existing systems as well. Finding or even creating correct fittings, connectors, valves, and pumps is a time-consuming job. But hey, we’ve got you covered here as well. Stop using content that you have to edit or customize yourself, and start using our content for valves and pumps which work seamlessly together with the piping app. Designing complete MEP systems from now on will be a piece of cake.

6. I am finding bad content online, forcing me to create my own content.

There is only one way to solve this. Work with a content platform you can trust. Such as MEPcontent. And when you miss content you often work with, we can talk to the manufacturer (we have over 290 manufacturers we cooperate with on a frequent basis) and use your case (and that of the 30k other MEP engineers, designers and modelers using MEPcontent) to convince them to have their products BIM ready and available to download for free from MEPcontent. We keep the content up-to-date through our cloud services and content update sessions with manufacturers. The great thing about the apps is that they can do the downloading for you! So you only have to focus on your project and the deadlines to be met.

Image found at https://bestplumbers.com/the-dangers-of-delaying-plumbing-repairs/