The history of connecting and copying elements in Revit
When working with plumbing fixtures and piping systems in general, you often need to connect families. By means of fittings and connectors, all pipes have to be properly connected to each other to form a functional system.
Now, loading your desired fitting families in your project and correctly setting up the routing preferences will tell Revit what fittings have to be used in different scenarios when a connection needs to be established.
However, sometimes you have to manually connect two families or even copy entire parts of installations and connect them in another identical building for example. This can be quite a dull and repetitive task, not to mention time-consuming.
Top 3 reasons not to use native Revit for this
- The point where the connection needs to be made with the other part of the system will be marked as disconnected in Revit
- It will be impossible to keep the connectivity when you are copying elements and trying to connect them at a different elevation in your model
- In order to connect your resulted disconnected elements, you have to operate with different plan views and carefully align and drag the elements to the position where they should be connected, which is a very time-consuming job
A simpler and faster solution: the Revit plugin
An alternative to the native functionalities offered by Revit is this plugin that you can download for free right away. With this Connect & Copy tool you can make multiple copies of an element (like equipment or specific fittings) and connect it immediately to other elements (like pipes or ducts).