Feed through lugs in Revit MEP 2020

Feed through lugs in Revit MEP 2020

We are excited to deliver functionality in Revit 2020 responding to several related requests on the Revit Idea Station for better support of the creation and documentation of electrical distribution systems containing panels with feed through lugs.  For those of you using external tools to do more in-depth analysis, this enhancement provides a more accurate model for analysis and circuit coordination by eliminating a breaker in the model and using feed through lugs instead.

A new panel schedule template, called Feed Through Lugs Panel, is included in the US Imperial and Metric Systems-default and Electrical-default templates.

This template demonstrates usage of some additional parameters that summarize loads that are directly connected to circuits in the panel (This Section Total), parameters that summarize loads that are fed from a child panel through feed through lugs (Total Load

Connected to Feed Through Lugs), and a set of parameters showing the overall totals (Panel Grand Totals).

For a panel to feed another panel through feed through lugs, you first need to enable the feed through lugs on the panel.  This is an instance parameter that you can set as the default in the family editor.

With Feed Through Lugs enabled, create a circuit to connect one panel to another and select whether the circuit is fed from a Breaker or from Feed Through Lugs.

Once the connection is made, use the Circuit Numbering Option setting to continue the circuit numbering from one panel to the next.  For example, if the first panel is numbered from 1-42, select Continue Numbering on the second panel to start the number with 43 as shown below.

Note that we did not make any changes to how Sub Feed Lugs behave.  During our research, we heard from users that Feed Through Lugs is more commonly used than Sub Feed lugs, so we made those improvements first.  We moved the Sub Feed Lugs property from type to instance.