SolidWorks Electrical 3D

I am looking for new software for designing electrical schematics as well as laying out panels in 3D. We are a mid sized manufacturing facility and I do the majority of the Electrical and automation design. I have traditionally used various flavors of 2D Autocad for my drawings but am looking to upgrade. I have narrowed it down to Eplan, Autocad Electrical, and SolidWorks Electrical 3D. My goal is to produce better drawing packages (schematics/panel layouts/Bom's/cable schedules) for both our in house electricians and contractors/panel builders for projects going forward as well as cut down the time required to produce these documents.

I have searched the forum and found a lot of opinions on Eplan and Autocad Electrical but not a lot of information or user opinions on SolidWorks Electrical. Right now I am leaning towards Eplan but am looking for opinions from anyone using Solidworks for this type of work.

Thanks in advance.

Call your local Solidworks vendor and ask for a demo.

It is a huge step up from 2D AutoCAD. I've used 2D AutoCAD before and found it really tedious.

I have demoed it, but haven't got the approval to purchase it. The main issue I had was that you have to download and associate the cad file with the symbol. There was no 3D cad library provided. They do have a bunch of manufacturer specs built in. You could drop a breaker symbol in your schematic and then open it up and search (by current, voltage rating, etc.) the library to find a specific part that would fit your needs. But if you wanted to open the 3D part up and drop it into your panel you had to go to the manufacturer's site and download the file and then associate it with the part.

If your mechanical designer uses Solidworks, it is really nice to use. I would purchase just for the collaboration possibilities. Our whole engineering department has Solidworks, so it will be an add on for me.

I will give our vendor a call but unfortunately I am located right in the middle of nowhere. The nearest reseller is 250 miles away which doesn't make it very easy for a salesman to just pop in.

The library limitations you noted to sound like a bit of a pita.

They shouldn't have to come out. Our vendor just used the regular install file and gave me a demo key that expired in 60 days. They could probably ship a you the installation DVD.

I liked what I saw in the demo I was given. The only problem i saw was the price is about the same as a seat of Solidworks ($5-6k) I think if you were using Solidworks for your mechanical stuff it would be a dream. You can find several videos on Youtube that might help.

The problem that I run into is that many of my customers want their mechanical drawings in SolidWorks, but they want their electrical drawings in AutoCad.

Our mechanical drawings are a mix of Autocad, SolidWorks, and Inventor. Our electrical is mostly Autocad. I am looking for a standard going forward rather than focusing too much on what we did in the past.

To be honest we don't have electronic copies of most of our electrical drawings, if we can come up with a drawing standard I would make it a project to make new prints for these machines.