Switchgear database software???

[tony_m]

I work at a fairly large plant with five utility feeds, about a dozen power centers, each feeding many MCCs and countless LPs. Through experience we all have a good idea of where feeders are located for most pieces of equipment. Trying to locate something rarely used (especially at 3am) is sometimes like searching for a needle in a haystack.

I would like to supply our engineers with a book that shows each switchgear and panel layout and an index of every piece of equipment and its feeder location. Ultimately I want to include and label every single outlet and light switch, assuming I live that long.

I have some old excel spreadsheets that someone drew up about ten years ago that I've been updating, but I feel there must be a better way. Is there software available that will do something like this? So far Google has come up empty.

Thanks!

 

[jdsmith]

Do you have a set of single lines and a set of electrical equipment maps? Give each piece of electrical equipment a unique ID number that is on the single line, on a set of electrical maps, and on a label on the equipment itself. My plant is outdoors, over 300 acres, and we can quickly locate any motor by typing the motor ID into our document management system and it brings up all data sheets for the equipment, a map showing the location, schematics, interconnection drawings, and a single line. You can find the relevant MCC or switchgear using the single line then look back at the map to locate the MCC or switchgear.

If you already have the maps and numbering system in place you may just need document management software. From the software perspective the software packages are not unique to the electrical field or even to technical document management. If you're only looking to organize electrical drawings there are probably small, inexpensive packages that would work for you, as opposed to packages that could handle documents for a hospital or complex organization with many more types of documents, ways to cross reference them, and security regulations.

 

[Doug S.]

What I did...

What I did...

I wrote a few web-pages for our in-house stuff. If you have a guy on the maint. or IT staff that's any good at it, it's a nice way to go.

It's currently set up for our Sq-d dist. panels, and because I wrote it for our facility it's easy to use and I've even got it set up to print new panel legends. Every thing is stored in a database so we can keep records down to individual breakers. ( We don't tho =\ )

Because the "system" is accessed via a web-browser any of our tech's can get at it via any PC AND the web-server and db software is open source so the boss has only spent my man hours on the mess.

If I find time (that's a big if) I'll put a copy of it on my "outside world" web-site...

My 2?
Doug S.

 

[hurk27]

Many high rise buildings like in Chicago, and New York, have this kind of software, so maintenance or fire men can locate where each circuit is supplied from, from what floor to what room. so I would assume there has to be something out there for large plants, I could see the convenience of looking up the loads at any one time and knowing where and how much a panel is loaded.

 

[jdsmith]

Many high rise buildings like in Chicago, and New York, have this kind of software, so maintenance or fire men can locate where each circuit is supplied from, from what floor to what room. so I would assume there has to be something out there for large plants, I could see the convenience of looking up the loads at any one time and knowing where and how much a panel is loaded.

Have fun keeping it updated enough to do a load analysis. I did a major lighting replacement in the last year and found out that we have minimal documentation of all 120V panels and what we did have was usually wrong. Our single lines 480V and up are fairly accurate but we run into problems there too if someone outside of the core electrical group does some work and doesn't turn in the drawing markups.

 

[tony_m]

Doug,

That's pretty much what I'm looking at doing. I have a WAMP server for a few other projects I did that will also be used for this. Did you write that in PHP? If you find the time to upload the files, I would really appreciate the help!