Revit Families for Plumbing Products
Industry : Commercial Plumbing Products Manufacturing Location : Australia
Outcome & benefits
- Quality Revit content is easy to use, as it functions reliably in a range of projects and project phases.
- The manufactured content was made available in a format appropriate for architecture and engineering documentation deliverables.
- BIM Revit family creation for plumbing products hence made these products part of the new standard, and made them likely to be used across projects with BIM based processes – particularly for facility management.
Related services
This case study draws on ASTCAD’s plumbing drafting services. We also deliver:
- Bim services — for related project requirements
- Mep design and drafting — for complementary deliverables
Need a similar project delivered?
ASTCAD is Australia’s trusted CAD design and drafting partner since 2010. We deliver to AS 1100, AS 4100, AS 3600 and AS/NZS 3000 across mechanical, structural, civil, architectural and electrical disciplines.
How we build Revit families for plumbing products
Revit families for plumbing products only earn adoption when they behave well inside real projects. We build each family from the manufacturer’s dimensional data, model at the right level of detail — enough geometry to read correctly, not so much that it bloats project files — and structure parameters so specifiers can schedule flow rates, connection sizes and product codes directly. Connectors are placed and configured properly so the families participate in Revit MEP systems, and naming follows a consistent convention that keeps content libraries searchable as they grow.
Family library deliverables and QA
Each library delivery includes the RFA files with type catalogues where variants warrant them, a parameter schema document, and a QA report confirming flex testing, connector behaviour and file size targets. We test families inside a live project template, not just the family editor, because that is where badly built content fails. Updates for new product releases can be handled as an ongoing arrangement so the library stays current with the catalogue.
Why manufacturers invest in BIM content
Specification decisions are increasingly made inside the model: if a product has no usable family, it gets substituted at documentation stage without the manufacturer ever knowing the sale was lost. A well-built library removes that friction — designers drop the manufacturer’s actual product into the model, schedules populate with real product data, and the specification survives to procurement. For plumbing product ranges the investment is modest against a single specified project.
If you are a manufacturer or supplier wanting your range represented properly in BIM, send us a product catalogue and we will scope the library — typically priced per family with volume tiers — and deliver a pilot batch so your team can validate the approach before committing to the full range.
The plumbing sector has a specific advantage here: hydraulic consultants reuse trusted families project after project, so a well-built library compounds. Once your tapware, valves or fixtures are in a consultant’s template, they appear in every subsequent project that firm documents — a distribution channel that outlasts any advertising spend. We have watched single family libraries carry manufacturer products into hundreds of projects over their lifetime, and the library maintenance cost is trivial against that reach.
Getting started is deliberately low-friction: pick five representative products from your range, send us the spec sheets and dimensional drawings, and we will deliver the pilot families within a fortnight. Your team tests them in a real project template, we adjust the schema from that feedback, and the full library then proceeds against a proven standard. Most manufacturers know within that first fortnight whether BIM content will move their specification numbers.