Batch copying only the objects with electrical connectors may be tricky.

Massive changes mean a lot of coordination alerts, so not the best workaround in big models.

Extremely large models have their own problems with copy/monitoring too many objects.

For scheduling, you would also need to create a new schedule for mechanical equipment that reports the values you need rather than it being electrical.

This workaround specifies creating a mechanical equipment family.

The idea of a data placeholder is to have an object to place in your model with correct information to schedule items not in your model, but represented elsewhere in linked models.

This kind of logic for placeholder families can apply to other disciplines, but I wanted to get very specific here with a real use case and to see if it saves someone a lot of time. This allows you to have full control over what shows up in a schedule of their equipment types. This ensures that on every project with different engineers, you edit the parameter with a formula that says your parameter is equal to their parameter name.

Note: If you work with multiple engineers that have different parameters for the ID of the element, you may want an extra parameter to use for scheduling called MARKID (or something similar).

If you know the mechanical engineer uses the same parameter type, like a Mark or Type Mark for the data associated with the type of equipment, it should schedule in motor lists and other schedules with the ID they used so you are coordinated across models. Not only that, in your placeholder family you can add 2D geometry for coarse and medium detail, which allows you to have a symbol representation for the box or motor you are powering up, rather than the Mechanical 3D equipment in this case. The placeholder can be powered and circuited at that point. The monitoring effect would stay put, so any change to the mechanical model would cause a coordination review to accept or reject the change. If we do that process and have a disconnect switch and/or Motor families available, we could type swap one with the other, as long as they are of the same Mechanical Equipment category. Purpose? Mechanical equipment can be batch copied from one file to another via the copy/monitor command. Solution: An expanded version of a placeholder family, or a hybrid of a disconnect switch and placeholder. But the mechanical data won’t read through the linked file for electrical circuits because it does not exist in the same file. Most firms doing Electrical Engineering have a disconnect switch with the data for the circuit held in the connector.

Disconnect switch symbol autocad