Most ASP Level 2 contractors quote jobs the same way: drive to the site, eyeball the cable run, scribble some measurements, and work out a price back at the office. It works — but it's slow, and the measurements are often off by 10-20%.

The Problem with Eyeballing

When you estimate a cable run by eye, several things go wrong:

Distance errors compound. A 5m error on a 40m run changes your cable cost and can flip a voltage drop calculation from pass to fail.
You forget items. Without a visual design, it's easy to miss an inspection pit, a UGOH riser, or a trench marker.
Every quote requires a site visit. That's 1-2 hours of driving, parking, and walking around — for a quote the client might not accept.

A Better Approach

High-resolution satellite imagery is now detailed enough to see fences, poles, and building features at property level. That means you can:

Enter the address and view the property from above
Draw the cable route along the actual path it would take — around fences, along boundaries, to the switchboard
Get real measurements calculated from the drawn route, not a straight-line guess
Check compliance — voltage drop, cable sizing, inspection pit requirements — before you commit to a price

What This Means for Your Business

If you quote 5 jobs a week and each site visit takes 2 hours including travel, that's 10 hours a week — a full day and a quarter — spent on quoting alone. Design from your desk and you get that time back for billable work.

More accurate quotes also mean fewer surprises on site. When you've designed the route visually and the tool has auto-populated your materials list, you're less likely to underquote and eat the difference.

Try It

MAINS is free during beta. Enter an address, draw your route, and see how close your usual estimates are to the actual measured distance.