Wiring & plumbing runs

What runs are

The Systems tab in the left sidebar plans the invisible half of a conversion: the 12V cables and water lines behind the furniture. A run is a routed polyline through the van — battery to fridge, tank to tap — that VanPlot measures for you, so "how many meters of cable do I actually need?" gets a real answer instead of a guess.

Runs come in two kinds: Cable run (yellow) and Water run (blue). Both draw as rounded conduit in the 3D scene, and both feed their lengths — plus 10% slack — into the Build Sheet's materials estimate, priced at your editable per-meter rates.

Routing a run

Routing is click-by-click: each click drops a waypoint, and the line between waypoints hugs the van's inner shell.

1. Open the Systems tab and press Cable run or Water run.
2. Click your starting point — on a wall, the floor, or the ceiling. A ghost dot previews where the next point will land before you click.
3. Keep clicking waypoints along the route. The run pins to the shell and turns square corners like real conduit — no diagonal shortcuts through the living space.
4. Misclicked? Backspace (or the undo button in the panel) removes the last point.
5. Press Enter (or Finish) to save the run — it needs at least two points. Esc discards the draft entirely.

Managing runs & reading the totals

Every saved run is a row in the Systems tab with its kind, length, and point count; hovering shows a trash button to delete it. Below the list, running totals show Cable to buy and Pipe to buy — each the sum of its runs plus 10% slack.

Those same totals appear in the Build Sheet's materials estimate, priced per meter at rates you can edit there — so routing your wiring honestly is what turns the budget from a guess into a plan. Runs are saved with the project.

Runs do more than count metres: the Wiring diagram export matches each power-drawing item to the nearest end of a cable run to size its cable gauge and fuse, and the Water schematic does the same with water runs for every sink, shower and toilet — without runs, both fall back to a straight-line estimate. See The Build Sheet for both exports.