Boards and circuits

You can work with the boards and circuits in your certificates from Pirform's Circuits and Test Results area.

Overview

Use the ribbon to add, copy, or remove boards and circuits, change the ordering, merge or unmerge three-phase circuit groups, and adjust observations at the board.

Select the board you want to work with using the board selection control. The Find Box lets you search for the board you want to work with. You can also hold the Ctrl and Alt keys and use the Up or Down arrows to move through your boards (read more about Pirform's keyboard shortcuts here).

Observations at a board

Observations against the board are shown in the separate Observations tab.

Circuit remarks

You can enter remarks against a circuit to record, for example, that the circuit is made up of twin cables.

To enter remarks, first toggle them by clicking Show Remarks in the ribbon, select the appropriate circuit, then enter the remarks at the bottom of the screen:

These appear on the certificate in the remarks section of the certificate's PDF.

Report protective devices as bidirectional or unidirectional

A3:2024 introduces new guidance in 530.3.201 around when protective devices are bidirectional or unidirectional. You can use circuit remarks for any comments against the circuit:

Notes at a board

You can also enter notes against the board to record, for example, items required for later works. These do not appear on the certificate but can be viewed in the Board Manager and exported to Excel to work with outside of Pirform.

Copying boards and circuits

In the Circuits and Test Results section of the certificate, you will find features for copying boards and circuits.

Copying boards

Go to the board you want to copy and click Copy Board in the ribbon. You will be presented with the option to copy with the same supply or with the supply as the origin.

A new board will be created with "copy N" appended to the designation.

Copying circuits

Select the circuit you want to copy (the marker in the leftmost column has an arrow to show the selected circuit) and then choose one of the options under the Copy Circuit menu in the ribbon:

If you select Copy to Current Board, a new circuit with the same values as the selected circuit will be created in the current board.

If you select Copy to Clipboard, the selected circuit will be available for pasting into any board you choose. You can paste the copied circuit as many times as you wish. You can see the circuit that is in the clipboard at the bottom of the screen.

Once a circuit has been copied, the menu allows pasting the circuit both as a new circuit or as values into the currently selected circuit.

Marking a circuit as a spare

You can mark a circuit as spare by entering "Spare" into the circuit designation. This will clear any values in that circuit and the circuit will be ignored when copying values down from another circuit.

Changing the board phase

You can change the phase of the board by selecting the required phase in the board characteristics. Pirform will automatically adjust the numbering scheme when you change between single-phase and three-phase.

Merging three-phase circuits

You can merge or unmerge a circuit in a three-phase board by using the Three Phase menu item in the ribbon.

Copying circuit values

Select a cell in the circuit grid and right-click to show a menu that allows copying and pasting values. The functionality in the menu is also available from the ribbon.

The following functionality is available:

• Copy will copy the value in the current cell so that you can later use Paste to paste it into another cell.
• Copy To Blanks will copy the current cell value down, stopping at the next cell that has a value.
• Copy To All Blanks will copy the current cell value to all blank cells in the same column.
• Copy To All will copy the current cell value to all cells in the same column (blanks and those that have values).

Moving circuits

The Move Circuit item in the ribbon allows you to move the selected circuit up or down.

Moving circuits up or down in a single-phase board is straightforward and works as you would expect.

Moving circuits in a three-phase board works as follows:

• The circuit will move up or down until it becomes the first or last circuit in its group.
• If a circuit at the top or bottom of its group is moved, the whole circuit group is moved in the board.

To show how that works, let's start off with a circuit in the middle of a three-phase group, 3L2:

Moving it up takes it to the top of the group and Pirform renumbers the circuits to make the circuit we moved 3L1:

As it's at the top of the group, moving it up moves the whole of the 3L* group up above the previous groups. Pirform renumbers to swap the 2L* and 3L* numberings:

If we then move it back down twice, it will be at the bottom of its group:

After that, moving it down will move the whole group to be below the following group, renumbering again:

If we move it down again, it will move over the merged group 4TP below:

Resetting max Zs values

The Reset Max Zs button in the ribbon allows you to recalculate max Zs values. You can control whether manually entered max Zs values are reset during recalculation and you can choose whether to reset values for either the current board or all boards in the certificate.

In this menu, there are options to reset the values for circuits in the current board or in all boards.

Max Zs values that have been entered by the engineer and not calculated by Pirform can be reset by selecting the menu items that start with the word "force".

Entering max Zs values

You can set Pirform to allow entry of max Zs values by ticking the box Allow changes to max Zs values under the Max Zs section in Pirform Options.

Using the board date

The board date is the date Pirform uses as the inspection date when you add new boards. Keeping the board date separate from the main date of inspection is useful in scenarios such as when you are working on a rolling program of inspections for an installation and reporting in a single certificate.

The board date will be first set to the date of inspection when that is first set, but you can select any other date directly from the ribbon (the same is available in the Board Manager):

Updating the inspection date

When you are working on a rolling program of inspections, you will often create new certificates by copying the previous certificate. When you set the new inspection date in that new copy, you don't always want to change the board inspection date for all boards in your new certificate.

Pirform recognizes this and asks whether you want to update the inspection dates for boards that match the previous date before making any changes. You can also optionally update the inspection schedule date and the board date for the certificate:

If there are boards matching the old inspection date, then Pirform only asks if you want to update the inspection schedule date and the board date for the certificate:

Other wiring types

Pirform has the wiring types A-H pre-configured. If you need to use a different wiring type, you can enter it in the Wiring Types in the Drop-down List Manager.

When you select these, they will be shown in the PDF in the "Other" section for the relevant board.

Ring circuits

Let's say you have a 2.5 sq mm circuit as below:

Previously, Pirform would have detected the word ring in the designation and not applied the cable-sizing intelligence. From the pre-release version of Pirform 2024.2 A3:2024, this is no longer the case. Instead, you can just suppress the intelligence that has been applied to the circuit, as shown here.

Parallel cables

There is no provision in the program currently for handling parallel cabling.

However, what can be done is to select the appropriate cable size and to add a note in the description to say that there are two (or more) cables coming in.

If there is any intelligence that arises that is not relevant or appropriate then it can be suppressed from the Intelligence Manager, then enter any relevant observations manually.