Drawings and records
Ask for the schematic on a fire alarm loop at handover and you will usually get one of two things: the design drawing from eighteen months ago, or something an engineer drew on a Friday afternoon from memory and the commissioning sheets. Neither matches the building.
That is not carelessness. The schematic is a second drawing of information that already exists somewhere else, and second drawings are always the first to go out of date.
Every circuit, whatever the trade, has the same shape. Something feeds it, the devices sit on it in an order, and the order matters. A fire loop leaves the panel and comes back. A data run goes from a patch panel to an outlet. Cameras hang off a switch. Doors hang off a controller.
Then the job happens. A detector moves two metres because of a duct. A spur gets added for a room that changed use. Two cameras swap ports because the cable was shorter than the drawing said. Each change is a sensible decision on site, and each one ends up recorded on the plan, or in the schedule, or in a photo on somebody’s phone.
The schematic is a separate CAD file that somebody has to open and redraw. So it waits. Usually until the end, when the person who knows the changes is on another job.
Fault-finding starts with a guess. A fault on a loop is found by working along it in order. If the order on paper is not the order in the ceiling, the engineer is walking the building instead of reading the drawing.
The as-installed issue is a week of drawing. Redlines collected from three engineers, reconciled against the schedule, redrawn by whoever has the CAD licence. Nobody pays for that week.
Nobody is sure which revision is current. Rev C on the server, Rev B in the panel, the design issue in the O and M pack.
The card in the panel door is from first fix. If there is one at all.
In Graftix, a circuit is a group of the devices you are already tracking, put in the order they are fed. Fire alarm loops, data, CCTV, access control, whatever you install. Star, radial, ring or loop, with spurs where they branch off.
You draw the run on the plan. Tap the devices in order and the cable route appears between them, with a numbered badge on each pin. Because those are the same pins your engineers already work from, mark complete and test against, the circuit is not a separate record that can drift. It is a view of the one you already have.
Anyone who works on tasks can create and edit circuits. Deleting one is left to admins and project managers.
From the run, Graftix draws the schematic: an actual drawing of this circuit, generated from the devices and their order, in your branding. You choose which labels appear against each device. Zoom in on screen, or download it as an SVG.
For issue, it produces a PDF at A1, A3 or A4, marked Preliminary, For construction or As installed. A pack can carry the schematic, the device schedule, the latest test results, plan sheets with the run drawn over the pins, and a mini-map around every device. Email it or download it.
The revision letter only moves when the circuit did. Issue it again with nothing changed and the letter stays where it is. Change the circuit and the next issue moves the letter, clouds what changed since the last one and adds a line to the revision table. That is how a drawing office would do it, without anybody having to remember to.
Riser diagram. Every circuit on the project, floor by floor, on one drawing. The sheet the maintenance contractor wants on their first visit and almost never gets.
Panel card. An A5 card for inside the enclosure, titled as a zone chart for fire alarm circuits, with a QR code to the live circuit. The next engineer to open the panel gets from the door to the current drawing in one scan.
Schedule. A full CSV of every device: its position in the run, its custom fields and its latest test result. The device schedule and the schematic cannot disagree, because they come from the same place.
On the phone. Graftix Go, the native app, does the same job on site: create, edit and draw circuits, view the schematic and the riser, and export the PDF.
It does not design the circuit. It draws what you have grouped, in the order you put it. A device left out of the circuit is left out of the schematic, and the design calculations are still yours.
What it removes is the redraw: the second drawing of something you have already recorded once.
Take one loop on a live job, ideally one that has already changed since the design issue. Group its devices, draw the run, and put the schematic Graftix produces next to the one in your O and M folder. Where the two disagree, go and look at the ceiling. That will tell you which one to trust.
Try it on a real job
Graftix puts every task on the actual drawing, then hangs the materials, certificates and sign-offs off that pin. Seven days, every feature, no card.
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