Tag: insulation

Slab Insulation Families For Download

Luke Johnson

Under-slab insulation (fitted or fixed below a concrete slab) is a legitimate coordination item. Typically it is installed first on site, so other trades and services must fit in around it.

This means it needs to be modelled by someone, which can be a headache in Revit. The slab soffit (underside of slab) often moves up and with concrete beams and pads. If you have access to editing the structural model, you may look for a way to incorporate slab insulation into the floor items themselves. However, this still does not work well for the vertical faces of a slab setdown.

To solve these, I created two families:

  1. A line-based, face-based Generic Model family that can be simply placed and stretched
  2. A 4-point adaptive component for irregular shapes. After placement, the four corners can be selected and moved into place.

You can download them here:

Slab Insulation shapes

And this gif shows the rectangular version in action:

Get the Host Pipes of Pipe Insulation on a Given Workset in Revit

Luke Johnson

It is pretty difficult to change the Workset of Pipe Insulation. The Properties Palette allows you to change them one at a time (but not multiple), while the method I posted about previously can change multiple Pipe Insulations to a different Workset, but it didn’t have a nice filtering mechanism.

Enter Dynamo… I made a custom node that takes a list of Pipe Insulations and gives you the Host Pipe element:

Then, I packaged this up in another node that collects all Pipe Insulations, checks their Workset, finds their Host Pipe, and then saves those Pipes to a SelectionSet:

So, if you have Pipe Insulations on the wrong workset:
1.    Install Bakery package in Dynamo
2.    Run definition as in image above
3.    Close Dynamo
4.    Load the Saved Selection
5.    Group these Pipes (which groups the Insulations too)
6.    Change workset (it will have already adopted the current workset)
7.    Ungroup
8.    Done

Thanks to Konrad and Andreas for archi-lab and Clockwork packages respectively. I get a few comments about my Bakery package having a lot of dependencies, but I like the fact that I just need to install Bakery and I get archi-lab, Clockwork, Lunchbox etc. Its like a rough and ready deployment solution…

Oh, one more thing. You may notice in recent versions (like 0.8.2 RC) that there is now some custom path management for Dynamo resources:

Good stuff!

Changing the Workset of Pipe Insulation in Revit

Luke Johnson

Insulation in Revit can be incredibly difficult to work with. It can be difficult to select the insulation individually, but you can select them by using a specific schedule (ie. Pipe Insulation Schedule) and then using the Highlight in Model ribbon button. However, once selected, you still can’t change the Workset (it is grayed out). And it seems that the Workset is set by whatever Workset was current when the Pipe Insulation was created (this issue seems to affect upgraded models, but it may occur in other situations). Some people have ‘solved’ this by going through and removing and then remaking all of the Insulation! But that is not What Revit Wants, not by a long way…

So, you might think “we can Group them and then change the Workset“. Also not possible – you can’t group Pipe Insulation without selecting its host Pipe. But guess what? When you select a host pipe and Group it, it will automatically add the insulation to the group too…

See where we are heading? If we want to change all Pipes and Pipe Insulations to one specific Workset, let’s do it this way:

  1. Make a Pipe Schedule
  2. Select all Pipes with Highlight in Model
  3. Group them (takes a while on 10000+ items). Now we have a massive group, let’s…
  4. Change the Workset of the Group
  5. Finally, Ungroup the massive group. Done!
    (Note: you will observe that the members of the group include Pipe Insulation, even though you didn’t explicitly add them)

 

Warning: be wary of the impact of grouping and ungrouping items in your particular project model. In most cases, it shouldn’t hurt too many things, but it would be advisable to test this process on a smaller set of your sample data first.

Slightly related tip – You can use Multicategory Schedules to Select Objects on Certain Categories
Let’s make a Multicategory Schedule, and then filter it to show only Pipes and Pipe Insulation (using some ‘greater than’ and ‘does not equal’ filters). Then, Select them all with Highlight in Model.