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Derek Cutsinger/5 min read

Setting Up Revit Interface for Fire Sprinkler System Design: A Step-by-Step Guide

Sprinkler Setup Checklist

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This Revit tutorial walks through setting up revit interface for fire sprinkler system design, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Before we move on, what I'd like to do is set up my interface so it's comfortable for me. Now, feel free to follow along, or if you like this setup as is, then you can go ahead and skip ahead. The Project Browser, with the Properties right below it—I find this uncomfortable to work with because there's a lot of information to scroll through.

I prefer to have my Properties docked over here to the right. So, if I hold my left mouse button and drag, it should dock to the right side of my screen. Now, if you're working on multiple monitors, it can be a little tricky, but if you see a silhouette, that's a good place to let go of your mouse button, and it will dock where you want it to go.

So, if I drag over here—okay, this is what I want. Now I can see more menus and options in my Properties, as well as in my Project Browser. So, let's find, under Mechanical, HVAC Floor Plans, let's go to Level 1.

Now, we're working with a fire sprinkler system, not an HVAC system, and the reason it's set up like this is because we brought our project in under the Mechanical template in Revit. There is no Fire Protection template, but we can set it up ourselves. So, what we're going to do is, if we see the properties here of our view, we can see that the discipline is under Mechanical, and the subdiscipline is HVAC.

Let's change that to Fire Protection. Now, if we click here, it is not an option, but we can type it in ourselves. Okay, now if we go back to our Project Browser, under Floor Plans, Level 1 is missing.

That's because we now have Fire Protection, and if we open that up, Floor Plans, here's our Level 1 floor plan. So, let's do the same thing with our other floor plan and ceiling plans. So, let's open Floor Plan, Level 2, and go to the subdiscipline, and now Fire Protection will be available.

So, we can select that. Let's go to our Ceiling Plan, Level 1. Okay, and we'll put that on the Fire Protection subdiscipline.

And finally, Ceiling Plan, Level 2, and we'll put that on the Fire Protection subdiscipline. Okay, now if I look up here, I see a Level 1, a Level 1, a Level 2, and a Level 2. I find it difficult to check at a glance which plan I'm going to be looking at before I click on it.

So, what I like to do is rename them here. So, our floor plans are actually going to be our piping plans, and our ceiling plans are going to be our reflected ceiling plans. So, let's go into Level 1 floor plan, right-click, Rename, and let's call it Level 1 Piping Plan.

Now let's go to Level 2, right-click, Rename, Level 2 Piping Plan. Now, here Revit is not asking me if I want to rename my corresponding views and levels. If Revit asks you to do that, please select No, because if we do select Yes, then when you go into your section views, your levels will be called this instead of just Level 1 and Level 2.

Let's go to our Ceiling Plan, Level 1, Rename, and I will call it Level 1 Reflected Ceiling Plan. Okay, and lastly, let's rename Ceiling Plan, Level 2. We're almost there.

So, let's go into our Level 1 Reflected Ceiling Plan. Now, with fire protection and our ceiling plans, we generally do not want to see any of our piping. All we want to see below the ceilings are the locations of our sprinkler heads, which are these here in the classroom, for example.

So, what we're going to do is we're going to create a new view template for our reflected ceiling plans. So, under our Properties, if we go down to View Template, it's currently set to None. So, let's click on that, and we do not have a Fire Protection Reflected Ceiling Plan already, but we're going to make it ourselves.

So, let's click on the Architectural Reflected Ceiling Plan, and let's duplicate it, and we're going to rename it FP for Fire Protection – Reflected Ceiling Plan. Okay, now let's go into our Visibility Graphics Overrides Model and click Edit, and under the Model Categories, let's find Pipe and Pipe Fittings and turn all of that off. So, how about Pipe Accessories as well, Pipe Fittings.

We don't have any insulation, so we're not going to worry about that, and our Pipe. Now, later when we bring in another MEP discipline, we can possibly come back in here and change those Visibility Graphics again, but for now, let's just select these. Okay, go ahead and click OK.

Lastly, we want to make sure this is on the right subdiscipline. So, let's scroll down, and under Discipline, instead of Architectural, let's change that to Mechanical. In our subdiscipline, let's find Fire Protection.

Go ahead and click OK. Perfect. Now, when we zoom in, we can see our dimensions between sprinkler head locations and our sprinkler heads.

So, let's go ahead and apply this template to the next level. So, we'll go to our Level 2 Reflected Ceiling Plan, go under View Template, None, and now we can select our FP – Reflected Ceiling Plan. Go ahead and click OK.

All right. Now, this is much better. In the next video, we're going to create our underground site plan.