gardmi 🇺🇸
Garden site planner
Draw it — breakers and sections compute themselves
Plan the electrics of your house and garden online. Place lights, sockets, switches and the distribution board right on the floor plan and the plot plan — gardmi draws the illuminance zone of every light, snaps devices to the walls, routes the cables, sums the load of each circuit, picks breakers and cable sections and checks the voltage drop. Even if this is your first electrical plan, the editor won't let you get the sections wrong.
Every device is a standard symbol with real dimensions and a mounting height — the same one an electrician expects to see on a drawing.
Ceiling lights, pendants, downlights, track spots and floor lamps for the rooms; bollards, post lanterns, wall lights, spotlights, floodlights, step lights and solar markers for the garden. Each carries its lumens, power, colour temperature and beam angle.
Drag a socket or switch towards a wall — it snaps to the wall face, turns the right way and shows the symbol on the correct side. Set the gangs, the mounting height, IP rating for outdoor sockets, or use a floor socket in the middle of a room.
The board is drawn with its real footprint, surface-mounted or recessed into the wall, with the supply power and phases. Everything starts here: circuits, breakers and cable sections are computed from the board.
Motion and twilight sensors, a junction box, a 12 V transformer for low-voltage garden lighting and a smart controller. Draw a switch wire from a switch or sensor to the lights it controls — the link follows the objects when you move them.
A light on a plan is not a dot — it is the area it actually lights. gardmi draws that area for every fixture, so you see at once where the path is dark and where two lights overlap for nothing.
Each light shows the rings where it gives 5, 10, 20 or 50 lx — the targets for a garden path, parking, entrance and terrace; indoor fixtures use 50–200 lx for hall, bedroom, living room and kitchen. Zones are managed like protection zones: shown on selection or always, editable, with your own thresholds.
Spotlights and floodlights light a sector, not a circle: drag the handles to set the beam angle and turn the fixture towards the tree or the façade. Wall lights aim along the wall they hang on.
Choose 2700 K warm, 3000 K warm white, 4000 K neutral or 5000 K daylight, set lumens and watts — the load goes straight into the circuit calculation and the estimate.
Low-voltage garden lighting is a separate network: a 12 V transformer near the house, a garden cable and bollards along the path. gardmi checks the transformer capacity and the voltage drop, which matters at 12 V on a long run.
The cable network is a graph from the board: every light and socket you connect adds its load, and every run gets its current, breaker and section.
Click along the route: indoor wiring, an underground garden cable, an overhead wire or a 12 V garden cable. Drop a junction onto a light or a socket to connect it; junctions stay pinned to the equipment when you move it.
Split the plan into circuits — lighting, sockets, mixed, 12 V, other loads — and name them the way the board will be labelled: kitchen sockets, garden lighting, garage. Groups are created, renamed and deleted in one picker.
From the connected load gardmi computes the demand and current of every circuit and suggests the breaker rating and copper section — 1.5 mm² for lighting, 2.5 mm² for sockets, more for long or heavy runs. The result is visible on each cable.
A long garden run loses volts along the way. gardmi computes the drop at the far end of every circuit and shows the checks as cards: supply exceeded, section too small, drop over the limit — before anything is bought or buried.
The plan becomes a set of sheets an electrician can work from — with a cover, a table of contents and a legend on every drawing.
A table of the board: every circuit with its name, kind, load, current, breaker and cable section — generated from the plan, ready to print and hang inside the board door.
Every exported sheet carries a legend of the symbols used on it — lights, sockets, switches, sensors, cables — so the drawing reads without a phone call. Devices carry no labels by default; name only what needs a name.
Cable metres by kind and section, fixtures, sockets, switches, breakers and the board add up into an estimate in your currency — as a sheet of the album or on its own.
Choose who the album is for — builders, submission or a listing — and gardmi picks the sheets: the electrical section, the lighting plan, the panel schedule, the estimate and the building notice, all in one page format, landscape or portrait.
Import the plot by cadastral number or trace it over a satellite map, draw the walls and rooms or import a floor plan — sockets and switches will snap to these walls.
Open the Electrical section: only electrical objects are editable there, the rest of the plan stays as a ghost. Place lights and watch their illuminance zones, put sockets and switches on the walls, the board near the entrance.
Draw cables from the board to each group of devices; gardmi sums the load, assigns breakers and sections and flags the voltage drop. Or ask the AI assistant to lay out the garden lighting — it places the fixtures and wires them itself.
Export the electrical plan with a legend, the panel schedule and the estimate to PDF or PNG — one file for the electrician and the store.
Start from the floor plan: place the lights, then the sockets and switches on the walls near where furniture and appliances will stand, then the distribution board near the entrance. Draw cables from the board to each group. gardmi draws the symbols, computes the load of every circuit, picks the breaker and cable section and highlights what is out of norm.
Typical targets: 5 lx for garden paths, 10 lx for parking, 20 lx at the entrance, 50 lx on a terrace; indoors 50 lx in a hall, 100 lx in a bedroom, 150 lx in a living room and 200 lx in a kitchen. gardmi draws the illuminance zone of every light for these thresholds, so gaps and dark spots are visible on the plan.
The common practice is 1.5 mm² copper with a 10 A breaker for lighting and 2.5 mm² with 16 A for socket groups; long garden runs need a thicker cable so the voltage drop stays within a few percent. gardmi sums the load of each circuit, suggests the breaker and section and warns when the voltage drop at the far end is too high.
Lights are circles with a cross, sockets and switches are semicircles on the wall with strokes for gangs, the board is a rectangle, cables are lines between them. gardmi uses these standard symbols and adds a legend to every exported sheet, so builders read the drawing without explanations.
gardmi is a free online planner. Breaker ratings, cable sections and illuminance figures here are general guidance — the final design must be checked against your local electrical code and by a qualified electrician.
