Wiring & plumbing runs

Route cable and water lines through the van by clicking waypoints — runs pin to the shell like real conduit, and their lengths price straight into the Build Sheet.

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.
Tips
  • Route along the routes you'd really use: down the wall behind the kitchen units, under the floor line, over the ceiling to the roof fan.
  • Hide a wall panel (or let auto-hide do it) to click points on the far side of the van comfortably.

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.

Tips
  • Route one run per circuit rather than one giant loop — "battery → fridge", "battery → lights" — the totals add up either way, and per-circuit lengths help when you're sizing wire gauge later.
  • Switch to the top view (T) after routing to sanity-check the paths against your furniture.