Software for editing and generating plans

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marmathsen

Senior Member
Location
Seattle, Washington ...ish
Occupation
Electrical Contractor
What do you all use for drawing up electrical plans and site plans?

I often have used Google Drawings which is a very bare bones system but allows me to share my file with someone easily. I essentially just take a screen shot of the plans from the architect and then draw up my electrical portion overlayed on that image. It works fine for us internally but I prefer/need something on occasion that can export to PDF and generate a clean set of scaled drawings. Case in point I need to draw up a site plan for a new underground service including proposed equipment and conduit.

If you get a set of plans from an architect and want to draw up a lighting and electrical sheet, what software do you use? I believe that AutoCAD is pretty standard but geez it's expensive if I only need it a handful of times a year and I don't need 3D. I've used Inkscape (free open source vector focused) which is fine but I think software designed for the purpose would be more ideal.

Thanks All.
 
I use Revu Bluebeam. I originally bought it for take offs on plans and found it to be really useful for all sorts of stuff. Very easy to measure off of scaled PDF's and count items. They have a full electrical symbol library you can download and use on markups. Lots of Youtube how to for them as well. I use about 1% of the features on bluebeam, Once you get the basic's of what YOU needs its really fast to use. Its also easy to print/separate pages from PDF's or zoom in on a section of a pdf blueprint and print only the zoomed in section.
 
SSDriver said:
I use Revu Bluebeam. I originally bought it for take offs on plans and found it to be really useful for all sorts of stuff. Very easy to measure off of scaled PDF's and count items. They have a full electrical symbol library you can download and use on markups. Lots of Youtube how to for them as well. I use about 1% of the features on bluebeam, Once you get the basic's of what YOU needs its really fast to use. Its also easy to print/separate pages from PDF's or zoom in on a section of a pdf blueprint and print only the zoomed in section.
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I like that they offer a perpetual license as opposed to an ongoing annual license. So few company's offer that anymore.
 
marmathsen said:
I like that they offer a perpetual license as opposed to an ongoing annual license. So few company's offer that anymore.
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Same here, they did just send me a notice a few months back that they will no longer be offering updates for my version. It works so well and I don't use any of the crazy complicated stuff I don't see an issue with it for a years. I can still add and update libraries of symbols and stuff, the software is pretty rock solid so I'm not worried. Saved me a ton over using annual licensing so far.
 
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