Introduction

A question came up from a Revit customer wanting to place a Revit tag showing the placement height or elevation of an electrical fixture. Using Revit 2019 this was quite a process which I will briefly outline later. Autodesk has included the ability to do this in Revit 2020 as part of one of the product new features.

Process in Revit 2019 (to explain the issue)

I’ve drawn a simple wall and added an electrical single socket from the UK library.

Not that the standard placement Elevation is set as 257.5mm above the level.

I loaded an Electrical Fixture Tag from the UK library as its not already loaded. I’ve then tagged the Electrical fixture using this tag. This tag references the ‘Type Mark’ of the Electrical Fixture, which is empty, so the tag also displays empty. I need elevation heights so I’ll Edit the Family.

I am now inside the Family Editor. Looking at the available Labels that I possibly can add, I do not see anything related to Elevation heights. So, we are stuck.

I opened the Socket Family itself and unlocked the ‘Mounting Height.’ This parameter controls the height inside the family. When loaded into a Project ‘Mounting Height’ its overridden by the hard coded ‘Elevation’ parameter and therefore do not adjust the fitting. There is also no way of linking the two parameters.

Possible solutions

I also tried a Generic Wall Based family and the same applies. The hard-coded ‘Elevation’ parameter overrides the other parameters. You can possible use a Generic Face-based Family ( and later change the Family category to an Electrical Fixtures category ) . Then create the fixture so that it will be added to the floor and report the height away from the floor as the Mounting height or Elevation. This is not ideal. Googling the issue I found that same people simply add another parameter ( to be used in the tag) and manually type the value of each fixture to be equal to the ‘Elevation’ parameter value. This is also not ideal. The best solution would have been to use Dynamo to read the ‘Elevation’ parameter value of each fixture and write it the other parameter which you then use in the tag.

Process in Revit 2020 (to explain the solution)

In Revit 2020 I opened the same file used earlier. Loaded the Electrical Tag from the UK library and tagged the Socket.

Editing the Tag and looking at the available labels you’ll notice the ‘Elevation from Level’ parameter. I used this in the tag.

The tag now shows the correct Electrical fixture placement height.

Note that the height measured is to the bottom of the fixture.

If you don’t want the value shown to be rounded you can change the units found on the Manage ribbon tab. And Settings panel. (or use the Keybaord shortcut of ‘un’ ) Then change the Decimal places to be 0.1 as shown:

Conclusion:

This Revit 2020 new feature has certainly saved lots of headaches for MEP users needing to report on the mounting or Elevation height of fixtures. It’s a welcome new addition.

You can also view a video on this new feature on the Autodesk Youtube Channel at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9ACS0LESN4

If you need more information with regards to Revit 2020 and it new features please contact us at www.mgfx.co.za/contact