ACA 2009 Electrical Question

[kpbarker]

I am a commercial designer and have been doing it for several years now. We as a firm have always gotten engineered electrical drawings form an electrical engineer. This has been a pretty good deal for us for years.

Now, my situation has changed a little bit. We are going to be doing our own electrical plans for projects that are under 100K. Also, we are doing more residential work, which we never use to do.

Now my questions basicly is, which is the easiest/fastest way to create these plans? I use to have a lisps that did this years ago when I worked residential design. We are using ACA 2008, and I don't think that the volume of work I would need it for would justify buying an addon.

[H-Angus]

Do you mean a plan showing lights, switches, sockets etc?

We occassionally do them for smaller residential work, we basically have a key with blocks representing the various items, then copy the blocks onto the plan, all of this would be on a different layout tab with dims, notes etc frozen off.

Kind of crude but we don't do many of them. You could get more complicated by having the blocks scheduled (similar to how windows are tagged and scheduled).

[dzatto]

I do all my own electrical plans. Basically, I show all the receptacles on one sheet (electrical). This shows the circuiting as well (shows what plugs are shared on what circuit), and calls out a breaker number that is reflected on the panel schedule.

I create a separate plan for lights and switches (reflected ceiling plan). Again, this plan will also show what switches are shared on a circuit, and call out the breaker.

The third plan has all the notes, one line diagram, and panel schedule. It's pretty basic, but we build small commercial buildings (about 5,00 square feet).

As far as CAD goes, I do it all in Project Navigator. Basic electrical layout goes in a construct, and all the annotation goes in the view file. I use the Autocad design tool catalog to get my symbols. They should have come with the program.

[kpbarker]

Well I guess I should have waited till I had my coffee before I started posting this morning.

I am working on a residential project. And I have to work on the Electrical drawing for permit. I have access to all the symbols, can make the legends and key notes that isn't my issue. What I am looking for is a little more automation than what I can get out of ACA.

I use to have a program (lisp) that would allow you to draw a pline, and it would automatically place the receps at an equal distance from each other alone that pline and rotate it to be correctly displayed. I am not sure if anything like this exists out there now or if there is any good way of placing these things a little more efficiently than by hand.