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Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Revit to SKM Power Tools

Revit cannot do Short Circuit Calculations accurately in all cases. Thus, many firms use SKM Power Tools for this. There are currently no publicly available tools (that I know of) to link Revit to PTW in any way (PTW said they are unaware of any either last time I asked).

You can use Revit to create some of the “components” in PTW. In Revit you need to create...
“special” schedules specifically for exporting to PTW. The example below is an Electric Circuits schedule grouped by Panel and with Itemize Every Instance turned off.

Revit schedule created to pass data to SKM Power Tools

Some of these parameters are custom and specific to PTW, such as <ComponentType>.

When you export the schedule to a comma delimited file, it will be in the format required by PTW. Notice that the specific characters required have been added to the column headers and title to produce the results desired. This schedule can be added to your project template.

Exported Revit schedule with first three lines added manually

This file can be imported into PTW and the component will be populated in the PTW project file.

FYI: You need to open the text file and copy/paste the text into a new Notepad file to clear the hidden junk Revit added to the file. If you don’t, PTW will ignore the file and do nothing.

Import Dialog in SKM Power Tools for Windows

Components created in PTW via Revit data