When doing electrical drawings, do you usually have Live or Nuetral to the left of the page?

Question

I am doing the drawings for my extension and it involves a load of 12V halogen lamps, transformers and various switches.

Broadly speaking, would you normally work with Live to the left of the drawing, through the switches, then transformers and lamps on the right or is it more usual to work from top to bottom?

Thanks in advance for the intelligent answers, all those who wish to just snatch a point are welcome to waste their time posting facetious nonsense

Answer 1

As far as I know there is no rule as to the position of the supply lines. If you draw two lines to represent the supply, then if you draw the lines horizontally, then the live is usually drawn above the Neutral whether closed together or one at the top and the other at the bottom of the page. Similarly if you draw the lines vertically, the live is usually drawn to the left.

Answer 2

It is true that there's no written standard where you draw your live with respect to your neutral, but as for me working everyday in schematics, it is my standard practice to begin form the left going to the right, and from top to bottom as in ladder diagrams. this is useful specially when you are dealing with more than two pages of interlocking diagrams, reading from the first page and opening the second page with continuities, not starting from the second to the first. i think this is standard in plc diagrams 'coz so far i haven't seen any schematics built from plc's that has a neutral on the left.

Answer 3

I tend to put the live wires at the top and neutrals at the bottom. But going from left to right is perfectly fine.

Answer 4

I work my schematics from left to right....and usually try to follow my signal flow. But the best way to draw a diagram is usually to make sure it just makes sense to a person (other than you) who is looking at it. Because typically the schematic will be used by production, who usually are not EE and need something easy to follow w/o any real reasoning.

Answer 5

Western world operates Left to Right .. so you would put Live on left = that's how the Electrician will expect to see it, and (unless you want it wired up wrong) that's how you should draw it.

Answer 6

source to the left .....