By Simon Brown
You can now join up the boards in our Electrics program to form the schematic layout directly from the floorplans.
This automatically creates the schematic (which the user has to re arrange) to enable much quicker calculations to be obtained without having start a schematic then importing the boards.
It works like this:
When placing the boards on the floor plans you will be asked whether the board is a supply board at the
point of placement. If this is the case then tick the box and from this point onwards this board will be deemed to be your main LV supply switch board.
You then add in your further boards and interconnect these to all your loads in the usual way.
You now need to get the program to allocate which board is connected to the Main LV (supply) board. To do this you nominate the supply board by selecting the board once (it goes purple) then “Insert Switching” and select the way on the supply board you want to connect the “L&P” board and select the (in this case) L&P board.
The total current rating of the phase and or ways then populates the supply board. Remember to think about the phasing arrangements in that you can’t connect a 3PH way to a single phase board so the phasing has to match between boards
The next stage is to define the cable lengths. To do this utilise the “Insert Cable Lengths” command and trace the cable run from the Supply to the recipient board.
You will notice the new “Electrical System Explorer” which enables you to ascertain which boards are connected to each other. Where final circuits have been completed these can be interrogated along with the circuit reference used.
You can also utilise the “Board Review” to delete and review circuits.
The Schematic…
Start off the 17th (soon to be 18th Edition) schematic in the usual way then select “File Import” option. This imports the board on the schematic layout which can then be re arranged. (I’m sure our developers can find a solution to tidy up the initial import at some point but the 18th changes are more important) so it’s down to you to tidy up the layout and connect to the supply transformer.
A viable alternative would be to set up the recipient early stage schematic beforehand, making sure the board references used on the floor plan based electrics project, use the same references as the board references. This way the import feature turns into an “update feature” so any initial loads entered schematically are updated with the actual design from the building model as the design matures.
So if you set up a base INITIAL schematic as below with estimates of your loads..
Provided you have used the same board references from the electrics project (below):
The references will “see” the recipient board as being one and the same and update the initial general estimated load with all the actual design data from the Electrics program. As changes are made on the floorplan, these can be reflected and updated in the Wiring schematic and the numbers calculated.
In conclusion, if you are undertaking electrical design on both the building and schematic model, hopefully this blog will give food for thought in how you can save time in developing the electrical project.