Site overlays
Site plans, reference imagery, and placing a drawing on the map.
Reviewed
What this is for
Putting a drawing the surveyor already has onto the imagery, so the array is traced from the roof that will be built, not from a photograph taken on a different day. A proposal page built around the site picture does not print until one is taken.
Steps
- Open Site. Take a site picture captures the canvas as it stands. Take it again replaces it. If the array has moved since the last picture, a warning says so: retake, or the proposal shows an older layout.
- The picture follows the inverters-and-batteries layer, so a picture meant to show a client where the inverters go is taken with that switch on.
- Add a site plan accepts a picture of a survey drawing. Select a plan to place, scale or turn it; its handles are on the map and its controls are below. A plan switched off is still uploaded. The row says hidden. A corner-fitted one says so, rather than looking identical to a rectangular one you cannot see.
- A site plan laid over the imagery is also the way out of a tracing that will not square: draw the longest edge you are confident about and hold Shift for every edge after it.
- Import KMZ or KML reads a survey or cadastral file. Each shape comes in as a field segment, a keepout, a boundary or nothing - the importer guesses and you decide - and nothing is saved until Import what is ticked; leaving the section discards the preview. Find buildings here lists mapped building outlines near the site; one picked becomes a field segment. The outline was traced by a contributor and says nothing about pitch or setback, so set both and drag its corners to fit the roof. None within range is ordinary; draw the outline by hand.
- What the canvas shows (the layers menu on the HUD) is names, inverter and battery markers, segment dimensions, keepout dimensions and the label size. Segment dimensions start on and keepout dimensions off unless your team's design defaults say otherwise, so a survey of twenty vents does not bury the imagery.
Tips and common mistakes
- Dimensions are how a segment edge is reached: click one for the exact-length box, right-click for that edge's menu.
- Do not send a proposal whose site picture predates the array you just laid. The warning is the product refusing to pretend they still match.