Accounting for Non-Coincident Loads in Revit MEP 2011

Hello from Las Vegas!  This week is Autodesk University, and you may sign up for access to many great sessions and presentations from the comfort of your homw/office via Virtual AU (there is a registration fee).  Check out http://au.autodesk.com/ for more info.

In my virtual session (which I'm about to also present 'in-person' in about a hour or so here at Mandalay Bay), I addressed that there is a commonly asked about limitation regarding non-coincident loads.. for example, if a building is strictly in a heating or a cooling mode, and you only need to account for the greater of the two in your electrical distribution.  There is no specific functionality for this, however, I hinted that there may be a creative way to accomplish this.  I had tried unsuccessfully to do this previously...  when we first shipped Revit MEP 2011, there was a issue that one couldn't use calculated values in the 'Load Summary' section of the panel schedule (or something to that effect)... however, this had been addressed in one of our prior Service Packs, making this method possible.

See the method demonstrated in this video, and be sure to check out the AU Virtual Experience for more great information!

Martin Schmid, P.E.
Industry Success Manager

Comments

[Brad Szopinski]

That is a pretty good way to account for non-coincident loads, but what if you have heat only loads? They will show up as heating loads, but if the overall building is cooling dominant, they won't be accounted for, when they can in fact be running, when rooftop units could still be in cooling mode (think receiving dock for a retail store). I ran into this issue and came up with a different way to do it, by building it into the RTU connector (for instance). I have it calculate, based on the electrical specs of the unit, the cooling and heating loads, and use the largest at the connector load. I also have a parameter set up to determine if it is heating or cooling dominant. This allows for the designer to change the load classification to match (couldn't figure out how to make it select automatically). Then, the largest of the loads is going to be placed in the panel schedule for that equipment under the correct load classification.

[Alexandre Cardoso]

Hello, I would take the opportunity to take a question :

I would like to insert a cable into a lighting circuit and this new cable is neither phase ( power) , neutral , or ground , but is getting the lighting ( we call here in Brazil "return " ) , how do I insert this cable in the lighting circuit ?