For MEP electrical engineers and BIM managers who already know how to do COMcheck, and don't want to do it the slow way anymore.
You already know the workflow. You've done dozens of them.
You pull the fixture schedule. You open COMcheck Web. You type in every fixture, every wattage, every room, every square foot, by hand. The data already exists in Revit, and you copy it into a second tool. Two to eight hours, every project.
You're not here for a tutorial on COMcheck. You're here because you've spent enough hours doing it manually to wonder whether anyone has fixed this yet.
Someone has. This is a short, honest write-up of what running COMcheck from Revit looks like when you stop typing it by hand.
The mechanics of COMcheck aren't hard. The pain is everything around them.
Some of the data lives in Revit already. Fixtures, wattages, room boundaries, exterior surfaces. The rest is interpretive work the engineer has to do by hand.
Space-by-space is where this hurts. For every room in the building, the engineer has to:
On a 200-room K-12 project, that's hundreds of manual classification decisions, plus the area lookups, plus the fixture-to-room assignments. Building-area method skips the per-room work but you pay for it with a tighter LPD allowance.
Then the design changes. A fixture swap, a renamed room, the architect splits a classroom, and your COMcheck is stale. Someone redoes it.
It's the wrong work for a senior EE. A licensed engineer billing $150-250/hr spending 2-8 hours per project on classification and data entry is a margin problem and a morale problem at the same time.
It fails QA/QC. Manual classification means manual errors. Wrong activity type, wrong wattage, missed fixtures. They bounce back from plan review and waste another round of engineering time.
Every electrical engineer in MEP has felt this. It's not controversial.
Autometica is a Revit plugin that produces a COMcheck .cxl file directly from your model. You upload that file to COMcheck Web, the same submission step you already use, except the fixtures, rooms, areas, classifications, and exterior surfaces are already populated. You spot-check. You submit.
What the plugin handles automatically.
Room classification. This is the part that matters most for space-by-space. Autometica reads each room and maps it to the correct COMcheck activity category from COMcheck's fixed list. "OFFICE 201" becomes Office - Enclosed. "ELEC 145" becomes Electrical/Mechanical. "GYMNASIUM" becomes Gymnasium - Playing Area. It handles the interpretive step that used to be the slowest part of the workflow.
Fixture-to-room association. The plugin reads which fixtures sit in which rooms using a hybrid XY polygon and Z-sweep approach. It works on tall spaces (gyms, atriums), mezzanines, wall-mounted fixtures, and multi-story projects, not just flat single-floor plans. Around 90-95% accuracy on real production models.
Floor areas from the model. Room areas are pulled directly. No more typing 152,515 ft² into a web form, no more wondering whether you grabbed the gross or net number.
Interior vs. exterior separation. Site fixtures are detected by name pattern (pole, wall pack, bollard, soffit, facade, etc.) and by ray-casting from the fixture to see whether it's enclosed by walls. Exterior fixtures land in the exterior section, not your interior LPD math.
Linked architectural models. Rooms come from the linked arch model and are transformed into MEP host coordinates correctly, even when MEP and arch level names diverge ("Level 1 - MEP" vs "Level 1").
Design changes. When the model changes, you re-run. The plugin re-reads current state. No diff-by-hand.
What it doesn't do is cover up model problems. If rooms aren't bounded, if fixtures are placed on the wrong level, if phases are sloppy, the plugin surfaces those issues rather than hiding them. RTM Engineering Consultants, an MEP firm using Autometica across their team today, call Autometica a QA/QC layer that catches model issues their engineers used to miss.
RTM Engineering Consultants, a ~50-person MEP firm, rolled Autometica out across their team. Internal champion's words. It saves them a couple of hours per project, and they use it as a QA/QC layer.
That's the honest range. Smaller commercial buildings (small office, strip retail), closer to 2 hours back. Large K-12, healthcare, or lab projects, closer to 8.
The bigger shift isn't the hours. It's that COMcheck stops being something a junior engineer dreads at 4:30 PM and becomes a ten-minute step during normal model review.
Run the numbers on your own firm.
Hours saved per project, times your blended EE billable rate, times projects per year. Add the QA/QC value of catching model issues before plan review bounces them back.
If your firm does more than ~10 COMcheck reports a year, the math is straightforward. If you're a sole practitioner doing one or two small COMchecks annually, manual is tolerable. Don't buy a tool you don't need.
Does it work with linked architectural models?
Yes. Rooms and floor areas come from the linked arch model, transformed into the MEP host coordinate system. Works when MEP and arch level names don't match.
Building-area method and space-by-space?
Both.
Which Revit versions are supported?
2022 through 2026
Does it handle exterior lighting?
Yes. Exterior fixtures are identified by name patterns and wall-enclosure ray-casting.
Does it cover COMcheck mechanical (HVAC)?
Not in the current release. Lighting only. Mechanical is on the roadmap.
Do I still upload to COMcheck Web?
Yes. Autometica generates the .cxl file. You upload it to COMcheck Web to produce the official PDF for permit submittal. Same submission step you already use.
How accurate is the fixture-to-room association?
Around 90-95% on real production models. Remaining failures are model-quality issues (unbounded rooms, missing rooms, wrong-level placements) that the plugin surfaces.
How accurate is the room classification?
You're always in the driver's seat. The plugin proposes the activity category for each room and you can review and override anything. In practice the proposals are right the large majority of the time, which is what turns hours of mapping into ten minutes of review.
If you do COMcheck reports regularly and want your hours back, get in touch. We'll run Autometica on one of your actual Revit projects and show you the output next to whatever you'd produce by hand.