Easy Electrical Circuits Using Revit

Creating electrical circuits in traditional CAD software is a manual and tedious task that can take hours upon hours. Many techniques involve using tables, excel spreadsheets, or lines and basic text to complete a set of electrical construction documents. With Revit, the process of creating electrical circuits to be used in calculations is an easy task. Let’s look at how to create a circuit in Revit.

First, you will need to put the desired electrical equipment into place. In this demonstration, we are just using a few receptacles hosted on a wall and one electrical panel named PP1.

With the equipment laid out, we can now create our circuit. The steps are laid out below.

1. 1. Select the receptacles you would like to place on a circuit. In this case, choose all 3 receptacles by using a selection window.

 

1. 1. Now click the button on the Ribbon that says “Power”.
      

 

1. 1. Now that a circuit has been created, we can name the circuit. We have named the circuit “Receptacle Circuit”.
      

 

1. 1. Once the circuit load has been named, we will select which panel we would like to connect the circuit to by using the dropdown menu. Our panel is named PP1, so we will select that.
      

 

1. 1. Once a panel is selected, the circuit is created and connected. It will be calculated and can be shown in the panel schedule. However, we can take one last step to show the circuit on our plan.

 

1. With the circuit still selected, click the button for “Arc Wire” to create a visible line linking your receptacles together and showing a “Home Run”.
   

And that’s it! Now we have a live circuit being calculated by Revit and we have a representation on our plan showing the circuit. You can now add or remove items from the circuit and the calculations will update. It’s the same process for any other circuit you may need. In a future blog, we will look at tag annotations and how to manage them for our electrical systems.