He chooses the right materials to make sure the system lasts for years with minimal maintenance. If you get a top-notch plumbing engineer, you probably won't need to call the plumber very often Apple

Building Information Modeling utilizes dynamic and a real-time 3D model of the facility so as to optimize the Efficiency of the facility building process. It assists in developing synchronization amongst the different sections of building design, construction and building management. 

liveresumeexamples.com

Thanks to advances in technology, you can construct a quality and comfortable home that consumes less energy in heating and cooling. All you need are SIPs to do this. 

RJ Weaver Roofing Dudley

You probably did them for your initially time frame,

 Having this type of conversation is always fascinating for the readers.

 Entertaining stuff through your unique piece of writing.

I have been using REVIT MEP since 2007 as well. Currently using 2012 on most projects, however, we have some clients that request we use AutoCAD MEP 2012 as well. We use Navis Manage for coordination and 3DS Max for rendering and lighting calculations.

Using Revit 2011.  The program is still not ready for production of plans.  There is no way to make useable diagrams from the model.  Microdesk and CadMicro both say draw the diagrams in cad.  It takes much time to learn and set up.  I can see the potential, but getting there is difficult.

We use Technical Sales International (TSI) CadMech as we also do fabrictaion drawings

I use Revit as well.  My first BIM project was in Revit MEP 2008, I completed four in Revit MEP 2009 and now I'm up to 2010, although I have yet to do my first project in 2010.  Also, to a lesser extent, AutoCad MEP 2009 is very good for BIM as well.

For anyone reading this forum that is new to Revit or thinking about Revit I will say that out of the box it is not a great product.  But the ease of customization and custom creation make it a very powerful program.  My first project in Revit was a hybrid.  I did the modeling, some basic scheduling and one detail in Revit and the rest of the details, schedules, calculations, etc I did in AutoCad.  But through working through the software, learning how different items interact, I am now 100% Revit.  Now as soon as I drop in(place it in the model somewhere) a water closet for example, all the schedules that involve a water closet are automatically populated.  Same with all my plumbing equipment, gas distribution schedules.  As soon as I draw a pipe, that pipe material is added to my pipe material schedule.  Once I learn a little Visual Basic, I think I will be able make Revit even more automated.

My last big project I did in Revit, we allocated 140 Hours for Plumbing Design & Engineering and 210 Hours for Plumbing CAD work.  I completed the project in Revit in a total of 246 hours.  Even better than that, the project is a month or two from being completed (time difference depends on whether you ask the GC or the Commissioning agent) and I have had less than 20 hours of construction admin time.  Most of that was because the architect (who did a hybrid Revit and CAD) forgot to put a chase, that was shown on the model, on the construction documents.  So the contractor put no chase and therefore didn't know what to do with all the exposed pipe.  Even on a smaller project we had 68 total hours for plumbing and I completed the design, specs, calcs and everything in 42 hours.

I use CEA's Plant-4D software. I have to say that it is pretty good for the most part. It is database orientated, meaning that you can draw in either AutoCAD or Mcrostation and the model you create is written to a database such as SQL Server or Access, it will also work with Oracle. You can have more than one designer running pipe in the same model at the same time. And one of the best parts is if  you crash you do not have to worry about losing any data because it is being sent to the database. So all of the data that you apply to your components, say dimensionally, weight, material, manufacturer, etc is stored in the database and only called upon when required. With this type of system you can save your design out to dwg or dgn and share for coordination purposes and the file size is extremely small. We have a 14 story building that we have up to four levels of the Drain, Vent system in one file that all of our designers are changing each day. We also have the entire Storm Drain and Overflow Drain System in the same file. It is up to about 20K plus components in the model and when we save it out to AutoCAD dwg format the file is only 2 MB in size.

The other thing that is really nice about it is that you can create spool drawings quickly with the ISOGEN program. This allows us to create isometric drawings that are about 95-100% ready to turn over to our fab show with not having to edit the dwg file that it creates.

A few of the drawbacks that I see is that it is a little cumbersome placing components and pipe in the models, not as friendly as say AutoCAD MEP where you can route on the fly and place components inline. Or if you move an elbow in ACADMEP the other piping components will change accordingly, P4D will not. The other thing is getting the components for your project. Creating an elbow is pretty easily done, but none the less time consuming. Plus they are not redily available from CEA either.

For the most part the fact that it is database oriented, it is extremely easy for other departments to get access to live data of parts being placed removed etc. from the  model. As well as being able to link components (both P&ID and Model) to project specific documents such as cutsheets etc.

JM

I am currently using Revit 2010. I have to say, I'm not that impressed. Plumbing is way far beind HVAC and Electrical. It's good for making a neat model, but not that great in creating construction documents.