Engineering Delivery
Plan an underground pit and conduit network on a satellite map — pits where they go, the conduit bank between each pair drawn along the run and face on at the pit wall, the cables inside it, and your own design rules painting anything outside them red until it is fixed.
Included in the 14-day Pro trial on every new account. No credit card.
Underground reticulation is the part of a communications or electrical installation that is hardest to change once it is in the ground and easiest to get wrong on paper. The questions are simple to state and tedious to answer by hand: how far apart are the pits, what conduit runs between each pair, will the cables fit it, and how much of everything is there. This tool answers exactly those questions and stops there.
You draw the network on satellite, street or topographic imagery — click once for each pit and the run reaching it. A route is held as a tree rather than a chain, so a spur can leave any pit and two pits can be tied together to close a ring, and chainage is measured along each branch from the node it leaves rather than pretending one chainage runs across a network that divides. Every run is measured with Vincenty inverse geodesics on the WGS-84 ellipsoid, so a length on the map is the length you would chain on the ground.
The conduit between two pits is stated the way you say it out loud — two 100 mm, or two 100 and a 50 — with a choice of how many sit side by side. From that one bank the tool draws two views: an elevation along the run with every conduit entering the pit at both ends, and a face-on view at the pit wall in true relative diameters with the bank dimensioned in millimetres. Change conduits per row and both move together, because both read the same model.
It is deliberately bounded. It does not plan or measure excavation, bedding, reinstatement or construction method, and it reads no terrain model. It holds no rates and no cost data. It does not calculate cable pulling tension or hauling direction, because installation is the contractor’s work. And it performs no standards checking — the design rules it applies are the ones you set, and it says so on every surface that reports them.
Real reticulation branches and loops. A spur can leave any pit and two pits can be tied together to close a ring. Chainage runs along each branch from the node it leaves and is always reported beside that branch, because two runs both reading 0+045 on different branches are not the same place. Deleting a mid-route pit merges its two runs and leaves the drawn line exactly where it was.
Every run is measured with the Vincenty inverse solution on the WGS-84 ellipsoid. The same measure drives the labels on the map, the conduit and cable quantities, the pit chainages and the design-rule checks, so no two surfaces can disagree about how long a run is.
State the conduit between two pits as a count of each nominal size, set how many sit side by side, and the bank lays out into rows. An elevation along the run shows every conduit entering the pit at both ends; a face-on view at the pit wall shows the same bank at true relative diameters, dimensioned in millimetres. Changing conduits per row re-stacks the conduit already on the run and both drawings follow. Nominal size is treated as the outside diameter, which is how AS/NZS 2053 PVC conduit is sized.
Cables belong to one of four families — coax, fibre, twisted pair and multicore, or power — and each carries the details that family actually has: impedance and screening; cores, fibre type and construction; category, pairs and shielding; or cores, conductor size, insulation and voltage rating. Manufacturer and part number sit alongside. No preset products are shipped, because a representative diameter is a fabrication and conduit fill is computed from that diameter.
Fill is the cables’ cross-sectional area over the conduit’s, compared against a convention of 53 per cent for one cable, 31 per cent for two and 40 per cent for three or more, with jam ratio and crown clearance where they are meaningful. That is a named industry convention, not an Australian requirement — no AS/NZS clause sets a hard maximum for this work — and every surface that shows the figure says so. A cable physically wider than the conduit is called out as such rather than merely reported as over-full.
Six limits are available and none is in force until you set it: maximum and minimum run length between pits, maximum change of direction at a pit, maximum conduit fill, every run carries a conduit, and every pit has a depth. Anything outside a rule draws red — the line for a run, the marker for a pit — and hovering it says which rule it breaks and by how much. Nothing is blocked and nothing is auto-corrected; whether a breach matters is your call.
The bill measures the three things you build: pits by type, conduit by size with spare conduit identified separately, and cable by type. It carries no rates, no totals and no wastage allowance. Rates move constantly and are regional, so carrying them would mean shipping numbers that are wrong somewhere the day they are written. Quantities are the drawn length or a straight count, and you price them wherever you already price work.
Undo and redo cover the whole project to fifty steps, with rapid edits collapsed into one step. Projects save automatically to your account and round-trip to JSON. Export the network as WGS-84 GeoJSON for GIS, the pit and run schedules and the bill as CSV, or a PDF report that states the design rules that were in force, everything outside them, and a declared limitations page.
Reach for the Pit, Pipe & Cable Reticulation Planner in any of the following situations.
No, and deliberately so. It plans the network — pits, the conduit between them and the cables inside. It does not plan or measure excavation, bedding, reinstatement or construction method, and it reads no terrain model. Nothing in it is surveyed. That scope is stated on the tool and on the declared limitations page of every report.
No. The tool performs no standards checking. The design rules it applies are limits you set yourself — a longest run between pits, a maximum change of direction, a fill limit and so on — and a design that breaches none of them has been checked against you and against nothing else. Conduit fill is compared against a named industry convention, not an Australian requirement, because no AS/NZS clause sets a hard maximum for this work.
Because rates move constantly and are regional. Carrying them would mean shipping numbers that are wrong somewhere the day they are written and keeping them right forever. The bill is a measured schedule: pits by type, conduit by size with spares identified, cable by type, with no wastage allowance added. Price it in whatever you already use to price work.
Because a representative diameter is a fabrication, and conduit fill is computed from that diameter — so a made-up default produces a wrong fill that looks authoritative. You pick one of four kinds and enter the overall diameter from the product datasheet, along with as much of the rest as you know. A cable is stored as a typed core plus a per-kind specification, the same shape the noIM₃ component catalogue uses, so catalogue-served cables will map straight onto it.
No. Pulling tension, sidewall bearing pressure, friction and hauling direction are installation questions, done by contractors who do it every day. This tool designs the network and records what runs inside it. What it does check is the part that is a design question: whether the cable physically fits the conduit you specified.
With the Vincenty inverse solution on the WGS-84 ellipsoid, so a length is the distance you would chain on the ground rather than a planar approximation. The same measure drives the run labels, the quantities, the pit chainages and the design-rule checks, so the map and the bill cannot disagree.
It is measured along the branch it sits on, from the pit that branch leaves. A chainage is only meaningful together with its branch — two pits both reading 0+045 on different spurs are not in the same place — so every chainage is reported beside the branch it belongs to.
The network exports as GeoJSON in WGS-84, which GIS packages read directly, and the pit and run schedules export as CSV. There is no DXF export yet. The whole project also round-trips to a JSON file for backup or for sharing with a colleague.
Included in the 14-day Pro trial on every new account. No credit card.
