Room Separation Lines Don't Play Well with Others

Please Use Sparingly

Room Separation lines are a necessary eval from an MEP perspective. There are times they must be used, and from an architectural perspective are completely appropriate.  Here is the rub, they don't just divide rooms, they also divide spaces. Spaces are used by MEP in place of rooms as they have more parameters pertinent to those trades.  The information derived from calculations performed either in Revit, or more commonly in external applications is stored in these space parameters. Now you may think if it should be two separate rooms, then we should treat them as two separate spaces right? Not necessarily.

The reading space above is separated from the lounge, stacks, and check-out spaces by room separation lines.  Unfortunately light from the windows in check-out and lounge will contribute to the lighting levels in reading.  Air being supplied to the stacks will flow into the reading space. But with room separation lines, there is no way to account for it.

When we are performing calculations for either lighting or HVAC, the two spaces communicate openly. The reason a room separation line was used in the first place is there is no physical separation. Light from one room will cross the imaginary separation line and impact the calculation for the adjacent room. The same is true for air and heat on the HVAC side.

Solutions for the MEP engineer are to use Zones as your export for analysis, which has other benefits as well. But if the doesn't make sense for the two spaces to be part of the same zone, then things get more complicated. There is no way from the MEP model to not have a room separation line from separating the spaces.  They must be deleted from the architectural model.  Then fake tags must be used to distinguish the two room tags from the architectural model, and they must be managed in the MEP model as well. Or the two rooms can be merged in most of the outside calculation platforms. If you are choosing to manage it outside Revit, you will have to be careful when updating to re-merge the spaces in your external software, and you will need to pick which of the original two spaces will be the container for the information.

Model It Right!

Another problem we see all too often with room separation lines is as a band-aid for poor model craft. Perhaps a room doesn't close properly due to an opening or non room bounding element that isn't obvious.  A room separation line is a quick way to fix the problem.  Unfortunately that gets translated in the calculation software as a wall opening. Assuming the line is drawn along the length of the exterior wall, then the room is seen as not having any surface separating it from the outside. To be brief, lots of calculations are reported wrong.