Hydronic Underfloor Heating BIM

[Anonymous]

Is there some kind of BIM for hydronic underfloor heating?

I want to lay the closed loop in a zone and preferably also route the PEX from the heating system. Data from this could be how much cable needed and provide a basis for quotation.

Anybody done this?

[Podolsky]

Yes, and it's a big problem. I've seen so many bad designed MEP projects (most of them, I guess). And you cannot find it put until you start to stack together pipes on site. Also material waste. MEP engineers don't really care - will they use 20 pipes more, or 20 pipes less. They just draw lines on plan - and all looks OK.
Like I've seen example of underground drainage design made by MEP professionals (it was very small, squeezed design residential) - manholes to drainage was located in the bedrooms under the bed. Why!!!
So I needed to sit, review Osma catalogue, write my own drainage pipes library elements, and re-modelling the whole basement drainage layout 9 times (!) to find the best and optimal layout. Then we ordered EXACTLY parts we needed and builders installed these pipes very fast (always looking into iPads with BIMx), saying that it is as simple as Lego.

[Erwin Edel]

I'm impressed they're willing to use BIMx for this, to be honest. The Dutch market is a system of a lot of sub-contractors for every discipline and it really is a mixed bag from project to project in terms of willingness to use more modern tools.

We really do always ask ourselves if the provided information is likely to be used or just ignored and their own design submitted for approval instead. We do lack some knowledge when it comes to MEP though, so we have some external advisors for this for our more luxury home projects. They generally work with Revit I believe, but still we can clash with their IFC exports.

[Anonymous]

Podolsky wrote:
This is why I'm connecting all my parts to LOD globals, set in MVO. Objects also sensitive to scale - but only in drawings. Let say the same pipe will be only shown as a polyline on plan 1:50.

Yes this is the workflow that GS should adopt. A LOD Model View Option should be created to manage this. This issue reminds me of an old GDL wish, which was the creation of a new Library Global that tells if the object/door/window was cut by a section or 3d Cutaway. To work with Complex Profile LOD... another well known wish. Of course the LOD Model View Option would need to include specific LOD definitions for Plan, Section, 3d and 3d Cutaway. With this, we could bring extremely detailed sections only in the needed elements, avoiding memory overload.