wiring drawing program

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Ponchik

Ponchik

Senior Member
Location
CA
Occupation
Electronologist
I teach basic electrical and basic wiring at the local school. I am looking for a program or software that I draw nice straight lines of single pole wiring, three way wiring, GFCI wiring....... So I can show the different color wires and how hey connect to the switches and receptacles.

Any basic program or software out there?

ETA: I want to be able to draw like this on my own.

Screen Shot 2023-05-25 at 11.01.06 PM.png

TIA
 
hillbilly1 said:
I’ve downloaded a few, but none were as advertised. Looked to be simple, but turned out to use complex symbols and not at all user friendly.
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I tried two myself. Not exactly what I want and YS friendly drawings.
 
I have yet to find anything basically useful for common wiring. There are a few that seem decent for electronics-type circuits and some that have general device symbols but are also part of expensive suites for making flow-charts, etc. I usually end up using a PDF program to draw lines between cut-and-paste symbols or images.
I have used TinyCAD a bit which is free and not too overwhelming. It is more intended for electronics and printed circuit type projects, but it will snap lines to terminals, etc. and doesn't have too much bloat.
 
Microsoft Visio is actually a decent program for this sort of thing. If you can prove you are an educator, I’m pretty sure you can get a really good discount on it. While my wife was still a teacher, we got a deluxe copy of MS Office that included Visio for $30. Then they have an “electrical” package you can add onto it that includes almost all of the symbols, but that costs extra. I just made them all myself and stored them in a drawing that I could pull up, copy and paste from.
 
Jraef said:
Microsoft Visio is actually a decent program for this sort of thing. If you can prove you are an educator, I’m pretty sure you can get a really good discount on it. While my wife was still a teacher, we got a deluxe copy of MS Office that included Visio for $30. Then they have an “electrical” package you can add onto it that includes almost all of the symbols, but that costs extra. I just made them all myself and stored them in a drawing that I could pull up, copy and paste from.
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Any time this question has come up over the last few years I always recommend Visio. It’s a very versatile program, there are many manufactures, especially in the IT world that have predefine shapes that you can drop in your drawing and they automatically rescale to the drawing size. Perhaps later I can post a couple Visio dogs I have done. It’s much much easier to learn and AutoCAD. It’s really good for doing schematics of electrical circuits.
 
Ponchik said:
I teach basic electrical and basic wiring at the local school. I am looking for a program or software that I draw nice straight lines of single pole wiring, three way wiring, GFCI wiring....... So I can show the different color wires and how hey connect to the switches and receptacles.

Any basic program or software out there?

ETA: I want to be able to draw like this on my own.

View attachment 2565505

TIA
Click to expand...
That kind of output is more properly described as a graphic arts product than anything else. It's much more than a simple one-line diagram.
 
We have a customer that switched from whatever CAD program they were using previously to using Vizio for all their electrical drawings. It's simpler than AutoCAD but you can't export the visio drawings into AutoCAD and it does not import AutoCAD files very well even though it claims it can do both.

It does have the advantage of being able to copy and paste and scale just about any bitmap image and plop it into a Vizio drawing. Unfortunately when you do that that's what it looks like. It's functional but it has its own set of issues. However for small drawing sets done by people who don't want to learn how to do AutoCAD, it actually works okay, not great, but it's adequate if you don't expect the result to look very professional.
 
My results is Visio are very professional. It’s great for one lines, I include excel panel schedules, I edit the excel file and it’s updated in Visio
 
Over the years I had access to many more complex CAD programs for work. At home I have used a program called RFFlow. It costs $50 and is a decent drawing program with a small electrical library. You can also make your own symbols and store them. It is nice that a free version can be downloaded as a viewer with limited edit capability. Not the best program and there is a learning curve but I have always found it very useful.
 
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