Electrical heat-tracing specialist, Pentair Thermal Building Solutions, has launched what is being claimed as the industry’s first BIM (Building Information Modelling) content for heat-tracing solutions.
The suite of new tools includes BIM families and the dynamic Raychem Trace-It Revit add-in for winter safety applications and hot water maintenance. With this content, architects, engineers, contractors and building owners can easily incorporate heat-tracing content into their building models to optimise efficiencies and performance.
BIM is widely accepted as the integrated process for holistic project collaboration and adoption rates are rapidly increasing across Europe and the USA. In the UK, this is reinforced by the requirement for BIM Level 2 on government projects by 2016.
Pentair’s new Raychem Trace-It add-in enables users working in Autodesk Revit to design, calculate and specify the company’s reliable, high quality heat-tracing solutions directly and quickly within their BIM models.
Smart tool
This smart tool automatically pulls pertinent information from the Revit model, such as pipe material, sizes and lengths. From this, it provides a bill of materials for the heat-tracing application, circuiting information and installation details to assist with estimating and construction. Raychem Trace-It is currently available for pipe frost protection and single pipe hot water systems with more products to follow in the coming months.
Pentair has also developed a group of families for ramp heating and surface snow melting, and roof and gutter de-icing.
“Our new BIM content facilitates engineering design decisions, providing the deliverables needed to handle each project effectively,” comments Jonathan Jones, European Product Manager at Pentair Thermal Building Solutions. “And importantly for the UK, we’re providing the tools to comply with the UK BIM strategy in advance of 2016.”
Brad Faulconer, Vice President and General Manager, Thermal Building Solutions, adds: “BIM is a game changer in how buildings are designed, procured, built, delivered and maintained. As the first company to introduce BIM content for electrical heat-tracing products, we’re helping project teams adopt an integrated and collaborative approach to building design and management.”
Instruction videos showing how to use the BIM families is available on YouTube – search for Pentair Thermal Revit tutorials.