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Wire colours
Colour schemes, standards, per-run overrides, and what the colours mean while the circuit is running.
In UnifCAD the colour of a conductor is a drawing convention, not its electrical nature. You can repaint an entire sheet in black ink without changing a single thing about how it behaves.
That separation is deliberate, and it is what lets a monochrome print and a colour-coded print be the same circuit.
The project scheme
The toolbar's Project wire colours button opens the table that maps every conductor nature to a colour. Four standards ship with it:
| Preset | What it does |
|---|---|
| UnifCAD | The factory default: readable, distinct, not tied to one national code. |
| Monochrome | Everything in drawing ink. The sheet says nothing about wire colour — which is a legitimate statement, not a missing one. |
| By conductor | HD 308 colours. |
| By function | EN 60204 colours. |
The scheme travels with the project
A drawing gets printed and handed to someone. So the scheme is saved inside the project, not in your preferences — the colleague who opens it, or the teacher marking it, sees exactly the sheet you drew.
Use for new projects saves your favourite scheme as the starting point for projects you create from now on. Existing drawings keep their own.
Colours that are reserved
Two colours are never available for anything else, per EN 60445:
- green-yellow — the protective conductor,
- light blue — the neutral.
And the protective conductor goes one step further: it only accepts green-yellow or plain ink. A brown PE is not a preference, it is an installation fault, and a colour that warns has to be enforced in both directions.
Every other conductor gets a recommendation, not a rule: the standard colours are offered first, separated from the rest, and the choice is still yours.
Repainting one run
Not every colour is a nature. EN 60204-1 reserves orange for interlocks fed from an external supply — that is a property of that run, not of a nature.
Double-click a wire to open Conductor colour:
- Whole run — the physical conductor, from end to end. A run crosses junctions, corners and page references and stops at a device terminal, exactly like a real wire.
- This segment only — just the stretch you clicked.
- Follow the scheme — removes the override and hands the wire back to the project table.
What the colours mean during simulation
One rule covers everything: ink takes a colour, colour takes brightness.
- A wire drawn in ink has no hue to keep, so when it is energised it adopts the colour of its nature. Draw in monochrome and you get a full-colour simulation.
- A wire drawn in colour keeps its identity and simply lights up. Draw with a colour code and the simulation stays subtle, because the colour channel is already saying something.
Two more things to read on a live sheet:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Plain colour, brighter | The conductor is at voltage. |
| A halo around the wire | Current is flowing through it. |
| A thick outline | The wire is selected — this works during simulation too. |
The protective conductor never lights up. No current flows through a PE in a healthy circuit, and drawing one that glows would teach the wrong thing.