the span smart electrical panel it's probably the most robust and feature-rich smart panel on the market but how do they work and how do I know if I need one I'm going to be answering those questions and teaching you all about smart panels in today's video the smarter way to go solar all right now in today's video we're talking about smart panels and specifically the span smart electrical panel which I think is probably the most robust and featur smart panel that's available on the market so what is a smart panel very simply a smart panel is an Internet connected software controlled circuit breaker panel where each circuit has a current sensor and a relay built into each circuit breaker okay so what does that mean first a current sensor or a CT current Transformer what that device allows the system to do is it knows exactly how much electron flow how much electricity is flowing through each branch circuit and so when you have that information you can then determine how much energy or how much power power each individual load or each individual circuit within the house is consuming both instantaneously as well as total energy consumed over a period of time now with having the software controlled relay it also gives the system the ability to turn on and off the circuit based on programmatic settings so for example you may want to program certain times of the day let's say when you're away from the home you're away at work you may not want to allow your air conditioning to run and burn that electricity so the smart panel can can be programmed to do that or let's say you're in an emergency backup power situation you're running on solar and battery power alone and maybe you don't want to run certain High draw but low priority items so you don't drain your battery too fast you could program the smart panel to turn off your electric cloth dryer or your electric water heater if you're running on battery backup power so what are the advantages why would I want a smart electrical panel well the first two things are just very simply it gives you visibility and it gives you control you know from the app you can actually see exactly what your home is doing in terms of energy consumption and you can manually disconnect certain appliances or again programmatically program certain appliances to disconnect under certain conditions to help conserve energy or to help extend your battery runtime during a blackout now of course the other benefit is for saving money when you're in a time of use scenario so those of you who are watching from places like California Arizona you know that in in many cases you can have a huge price difference between your on peak hours and your off peak hours now typically your your peak hours are going to be between 400 p.m. and 900 p.m. this is when the demand for electricity from the grid is highest this is when people are getting home from work they're plugging their EVS into charge they're cooking dinner uh of course the air conditioner is working hard because of the the afternoon sun is heated up the home so in some cases you're going to want to program the smart panel to disconnect High draw non-essential items during those Peak great hour so you can avoid having to pay more to the power company by the way if your utility company moved from a flat price billing to a time of view scheme uh go ahead and leave a comment below we'd like to hear from you so smart panels give you visibility control they help you extend your battery runtime and in certain cases they can help you save money if you're in a time of use billing scenario and that's a great time to introduce today's video sponsor cerit if you're looking to live a more sustainable lifestyle lower your energy footprint and become more energy independent then CIT is the home electrification partner for you CIT is our Preferred Home electrification partner offering installation of bidirectional EV Chargers smart electrical panels solar panels battery storage generators and high efficiency heat pumps many of our clients start with solar panels or electric vehicles then progress to whole home electrification so if you're serious about becoming energy independent and you want to work with a qualified and trusted partner then click the link in the description below so you can learn more about Powerhouse by CIT and get in touch with an installer right away thank you CIT for supporting the channel and for sponsoring today's video now I had a chance to do a Hands-On walkthrough of the new span smart panel so I could see all the different sizes that they offer as well as the different Integrations that they offer with for example the Tesla power wall or the span Drive EV charger in fact we're going to show you that footage now uh but before we dig into all of that for those that aren't familiar with smart panels can you tell our audience what is a smart panel and and when would somebody want to install one in their house yeah absolutely so a smart panel is basically like a standard panel it actually installs the same way as any conventional electrical panel but behind each of the circuit breakers right conventional off-the-shelf circuit breakers we have both a relay and a current Transformer so the ability to actually measure power and control it and this is really important for all sorts of reasons right we can actually use this information to deliver insights to customers so we can show you oh this is how much power you're consuming in this sector of the home we can then overlay the utility pricing during that time period and explain to customers what amount of money they're spending at different points of the day on different appliances and they can use all this information to actually reduce their their energy consumption and their their utility bills on top of that right we can allow unprecedented amounts of control because the panel right is a is basically a a controllable device that you can actuate relays with your phone so you can log in you can you know if you're out of town and you need to shed a turn off a circuit or whatever you know you can just do that remotely and make your home super efficient and safe cool cool yeah I know when I think about it you know the the two words that come to mind are visibility and control right the the sensors gives you visibility the relays give you that control you can turn it on and off or you can the software can turn it on and off for you now I noticed the first thing I noticed looking at the new generation panel is it's just a physically much larger panel now I think the the old panel was limited to 32 Breakers is that correct yeah absolutely and so what you see here it's actually an expansion of the product line so we still will have that 32 breaker space panel right in the middle but we've actually grown up all the way up to 48 on the high end and down all the way to 16 so we're really basically we we've recognized that everybody's home is unique you know some homes require multiple smaller panels depending on geography some require one large panel you know a new build is typically going to be one big 48 circuit load Center for example and so we need to have a product to match each of these categories which is why they now span from 16 all the way to 48 well I'm glad to see the larger size because one one of the things I've noticed you know covering this technology now for a number of years is a lot of the early adopters of this technology have larger homes right absolutely and so they they need many case they need larger load centers they've got pools they've got you know multiple air conditioning units and they just need more space yep so the 48 space version of the span smartphone is that something that's available now or coming soon so that'll be available in the first half of next year okay um looking trending towards the earlier end of that first half but you know still working out the details there and this smaller panel will be available towards the second half of next year so great soon great great now we talked about you know or you mentioned a couple reasons why you know why a homeowner might want to go with us smart panel you know one is visibility but also being able to save money especially like in California where we're recording right now you could have pretty significant differences in terms of your time of use rates you know your on peak hours versus your off peak hours abut so walk us through some of the use cases where you might use that you know use that feature to help save money how can you use span to help you save money with your existing home yeah sweet so I think one of the big ways you can do it right there's all sorts of way you can leverage a span panel save money and maybe I'll just start at the top so one amazing thing span can do is if you're a customer looking to Electrify your home you're looking to add any electric loads typically for most homes they're going to see they're going to reach What's called the service upgrade requirement so they're actually going to have to go to the utility and get the conductors feeding their home like the capacity of the conductors feeding their home to get increased by the utility this might cost several thousand dollars you know up to $50,000 we've seen certain quotes in in certain areas and it might take six months right depending on getting utility involved permitting and all this other stuff so what this panel can do because it can actually turn on and off loads on a homeowner's behalf right is it can keep the home below its service even if you've added more electric load than a conventional load C would allow so does that make does that make sense sure so in that instance this panel literally pays itself off instantly because the alternative which is going out getting a service upgrade running new wires into your home it might it might cost you know several thousand dollars and putting this panel in negates that entire need makes a lot of sense and then to your question about being able to see individual loads and and actually reduce costs like that right obviously time of use rates are becoming more and more prevalent and you know in California as an example there's a like a 50 Cent difference between the electricity prices at 10:00 a.m. and at 700 p.m. right and that's 50 cents so any insights you can have in terms of you know what loads can I move to the other time what loads can I just simply turn off during those two different time periods is going to be direct Savings in your bank and and we can actually show them that incredibly specifically yeah yeah well speaking of loads you know one of the largest loads that a lot of homeowners have here in Southern California is their electric vehicle charging so I notice you have the span drive here how does that tie in with this with the the system and how how might that work in a time of use conf yeah so the span Drive is really really cool so um we can do all sorts of things because we've actually made our own Hardware right we own all the hardware and we own all the software that lives on these panels which gives us tons and tons of flexibility to enable the the these two products to work together and this can do a few few special things one is we can set the power consumption or the the charging rate dynamically so we can actually tell this this charger to charge at 100% or 90% or 80% or whatever right and what that enables is a couple things one is you can you can obviously set schedules and make sure that you're mapping your time of use rate depending on um when you want to charge your car so that it's always the cheapest price right another thing say you have a solar pan like a solar array on your roof we'll actually be releasing very soon a software update which will allow the car to exclusively charge with excess solar that's coming into your home right so we know all the power that we know about all the power that you're consuming from the grid if you have solar we know how much solar you're generating we can actually calculate okay how much Headroom is there on the solar generation we can just pump all of that directly into the car which means you're almost just operating like a little micro grid right you don't even need to send anything to grid you don't need to consume anything from the grid and that keeps your prices super low and then the third thing so earlier I mentioned the uh service upgrade avoidance which is where we will potentially turn on and off loads to keep your home within its service right and we don't have to turn on or off this particular load right we're actually going to be announcing a whole Suite of products that well we won't necessarily be making them all but a lot of them through Partnerships that we can dynamically set the power consumption of the device so that instead of turning it on or off we can just turn it down a little so you got throttle control ex basically okay it's throttle and control exactly so that works on the drive that works with the Mitsubishi heat pump so we can actually talk directly to the compressor say hey you know the home's consuming a little too much power let's turn it back 20 30 40% homeowner will not experience a thing because it's a very minor change for a short period of time and then we can ramp it right back up so it's seamless that's great hansing and you know this this is consistent with the trend that I'm noticing here which is that these solar and batteries smart panels these are no longer stove pipe systems these are now part of whole integrated home Energy System that home energy system includes solar panels batteries EV Chargers and hbac as well now I'm aware that you guys have a new partnership with Mitsubishi where that allows for that that technical tie-in to where span can control the throttle on your hpac as well um and I could see that being important not just for for controlling your consumption or saving money but you know also let's say you're running in a in a grid down situation you're you're running on battery backup power well maybe you want to throttle the AC down so you can stretch your battery time a little bit further tell us a little bit about how does all this tie together right let's say if we're in in a backup situation yeah so I think the the way that span looks at solving this sort of intermingling of all these components in the home is through an integrated approach right and I think that's kind of what you see is the culmination of all these products coming together right everything is communicating everything is constantly like understanding okay what is the temperature of the home can I can I do a little bit of extra heating or extra cooling ahead of time to reach some certain you know uh energy targets sort of like you say you're trying to you know match a certain load if the grid goes down obviously we can detect that we can communicate with the Tesla energy Gateway and um shed loads shed unnecessary loads immediately so that you can ride through the outage with as much of your battery remaining we're actually able to extend the average battery life of homeowners batteries by up to 40% just by controlling the loads and making sure that things that you don't need are on making sure the the compressor isn't running too hard not using the the car charger unless you need it and stuff like that so it's really really meaningful for customers especially if you have a battery that's great can you tell us a little bit more how has the integration between Tesla and span changed with the the release of the new Power wall 3 yes so just like the power wall 2 and a couple other Battery Systems we're you know fully integrated the installation process is identical you connect the two with the basically an ethernet connection and we're able to seamlessly talk and um from the from the consumer's perspective it's no different except they get all the benefits of you know a power wall 3 which has high output um new look and everything all right so this has been a discussion of the span smart panel and how smart panels work uh FKS folks as always if you're getting good value from the videos that you see on solar surge make sure you give us a thumbs up and go ahead and subscribe to the channel as well if you haven't done so already that way as we have new videos like this coming out it'll come up in your feed and you can stay up to date with everything now of course if you're a homeowner if you're in the process of looking at different solar and battery storage and smart home options for your home uh if you need to get a price quote or maybe you already have a couple of quotes and you need to get a comparison quote to make sure that you're getting the best deal and getting the right equipment as always feel free to reach out to us on the L L below here you can set up a call with a solar surge expert or just use the free online quote tool to see how much solar and battery storage costs in your area well that does it for today's video I thank you all for spending some more time on the solar surge Channel and as always I'm Joe Oria here encouraging you to get prepared and be empowered thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon [Music] oh