Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Electrical parameters - what's your preference?

So I'm doing a little tweaking on our templates, and wanted to ask the question - what's your preference for assigning voltage/phase and load?

Right now, we're doing it by taking the voltage connection in a family, and setting it equal to a shared parameter named voltage. This makes the parameter editable on the type or instance properties (based on what option you select when you define the parameter).

I was thinking about making this a project parameter instead - that way, all schedules that need voltage in a schedule could already be defined, so when the part is added, you shouldn't have to edit the family for it to be available.

The question is, who's tried this out - and does it work any better than the shared parameter method?

The reason for asking is that we're getting multiple parameters showing up named voltage (with identical properties) when we go to create the schedule. We wind up adding all of them, then picking the one that actually shows the correct values, then removing the wrong ones from the schedule.

Thoughts?

4 comments:

Todd M Shackelford said...

David,

We are using them as project parameters, but we have "branded" them. So any scheduled parameter would be prefixed with "Schd-". Users will see all the scheduled parameters grouped together and no one will accidentally use "voltage" when they see "Schd-Voltage".

Tim M said...

I have not tried it out but that isn't a bad idea. I have just made a shared parameter for voltage in my family (lighting and power). I pull out the other default Voltage, then I can just edit it on a schedule or in the properties. I am not sure why you are getting the multiple voltage parameters unless you have loaded some objects with the default voltage parameter and other objects with the shared voltage parameter. So my thought is that it might work well for voltage but I don't think it would for other parameters because, I have formulas in equipment that are tied to the shared parameters for things like wattage, phases, poles etc.

Erik said...

We've had some problems getting our Shared Parameters to show in a Panel Report when they were Shared Family Parameters. If you add them to the project they seem to report fine.

You can even add the families with the parameters>create duplicate project parameters>create a panel report>delete the project parameter and then the Report will read the parameter from the family.

Note: This behavior was in RME 2011. And with files created from our template. I'm not sure our resources addressed the problem fully.

David Butts said...

I just added the post on duplicate shared parameters, now that I know what causes it - and it was because I had both project and shared using the same values, in some cases.

I'm starting from a clean slate for 2012. I think we went too far with the parameters in 2011 and added to much data we didn't need...but the ones that apply to more than one part, and are only used in a schedule, will be the project parameters. Everything else will be shared, and groups by the category they need to be placed in (such as Electrical, Electrical - Loads, etc.)