How to improve a standard electrical design process in Revit with Stabicad

If you work in electrical design and planning in the UK, you have to make sure everything has a logical progression, nothing is missed along the way, and there are minimal errors and design conflicts to deal with. If you’re already using electrical design software to make the whole process faster, easier, and more accurate, our guess is that you’re probably using Revit. 

However, if you’ve been using Revit alone for your electrical system designs, you might have noticed that there’s a lot of manual work, data transfer and rework that goes into the process. If you’re looking for options to streamline the process, reduce the amount of work required, increase accuracy and reduce design errors, then adding Stabicad to your design workflow might be exactly what’s needed. Here’s what you need to know.

Traditional design limitations in Revit

The biggest problem with using Revit to design electrical systems is that it’s not a specialist solution.

In fact, if you’re like most people, you will probably start in Revit, then do some of the design by hand, put some into AutoCAD, export some figures and then import them into Excel for analysis and verification, and then finally put it all back into Revit.

There’s a good chance that you might even have to bring out the scale ruler at some point during the process.

In a world where construction design technology is supposed to make the process easier and help us avoid data transfer errors, there’s a lot that could go wrong with a patchwork process like that, and it still takes a lot longer than most of us would like. 

How Stabicad helps to improve electrical design in Revit

Stabicad has been carefully designed and built to close some of the big holes in the electrical design process in Revit. It plugs directly into Revit and allows you to complete much more of the process directly in the Revit system.

In fact, Stabicad allows you to select and label materials for your project, identify cable and equipment routes, select from the nested drop-down lists of material options, create notional layouts, assign various service types and use the built-in auto-routing function. 

Stabicad also allows you to run calculations directly in Revit, and the system will even notify you when there’s an error and link directly to the problem so you can find and fix it quickly. As you work, you’ll also be able to determine cable lengths and grouping factors. All without ever switching between Revit and your drawing board, AutoCAD or Excel. 

What does Stabicad do?

Stabicad is a BIM solution for mechanical and electrical design. It integrates directly with Revit to extend the standard functionality within Revit and incorporates the advanced and accurate calculation power of ProDesign.

What that means for M&E engineers and designers is that they no longer have to leave the Revit workspace to complete tasks like calculations and certain drawings. Instead, you can produce compliant calculations from the Revit workspace, which means you also don’t have to transfer data and calculated figures manually, minimising both rework and the possibility of human error.

Stabicad also comes preloaded with a vast library of generic and manufacturer-specific content that you can select for your design, directly from your Revit model. So you no longer have to search for product information elsewhere. It’s all built right into the system. 

What’s the benefit of using Stabicad with Revit?

Electrical engineers and designers who use Stabicad with Revit have seen impressive results, including reducing their work time by up to 40% compared to using Revit alone.

Stabicad also comes pre-integrated with Trimble Connect, which means you can share your projects and collaborate in the cloud, which is perfect for teams working from different locations or where you might need to collaborate with other design or engineering professionals on elements of your design.

Experienced Revit users will find that the Stabicad tools and features are intuitive and solve many of the problems they’ve had using Revit over the years, but it also comes with an intensive onboarding program, so your team can learn everything they need to know to get more out of Revit with Stabicad without missing a beat.

There’s a reason that Revit is still the go-to solution for construction design. It’s still undoubtedly the best platform out there for this purpose, and that’s not likely to change. But there’s no reason to be doing so much manual work to create your electrical designs in the Revit system, and that’s exactly why Trimble created Stabicad.

To see how contractor AV Unibrak has transformed their design workflows and seen impressive results, including speeding up the design process 3 times, watch this customer video.