In this episode, John Maher interviews Brian Sadler, Vice President at Solaris Renewables, about the advantages of smart electrical panels. Brian explains how these panels, equipped with advanced technology like monitoring, control capabilities, and AI integration, are a major upgrade from traditional electrical panels. They enable homeowners to track and manage energy usage, identify inefficient appliances, and optimize energy consumption remotely. The conversation also highlights the seamless integration of smart panels with solar energy systems, battery backups, and other smart home devices, offering greater efficiency and cost savings. With features like real-time monitoring, automatic load shedding during power outages, and tax incentives for installations, smart panels are revolutionizing home energy management.
John Maher: Hi, I’m John Maher, and I’m here today with Brian Sadler, Vice President at Solaris Renewables, a solar company in Massachusetts providing premium solar and storage technologies with exceptional customer service and designing, installing and servicing solar systems in Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire, and Maine. Today we’re talking about smart electrical panels.
Welcome, Brian.
Brian Sadler: Hi, John. Good to be with you today.
What are Smart Electrical Panels?
Maher: Yeah, you too. So Brian, talk a little bit about what smart electrical panels are, what we mean by that, and what are some of the key benefits of smart electrical panels as compared to a traditional one.
Sadler: Yeah, in Massachusetts we’d say they’re wicked smart, right? We typically think of multiple generations of antiquated, your standard gray box that was put into your basement or garage here in New England or the Northeast, and that could’ve been to land turn fuses and then eventually breakers and now arc fault breakers and so on and so forth.
So, the evolution of a home’s main service panel hasn’t changed much in 150, 160 years, and smart panels have basically taken that same box, put it in a nicer package. So it looks nicer, it can be installed in finished environments, it can be recessed in the wall. So aesthetically, yes, it looks nicer, but at the end of the day, it’s the same basic bones. It has a bus bar to land breakers, but now it has a computer inside of it and it can leverage a lot more functionality into your circuits in your home.
So, not only are you able to monitor every single circuit in your home and see what that circuit’s doing, you obviously are able to label it. You know what it is. The panel itself learns. Now they’re even integrating AI into it, and it connects to other smart home peripherals as well. But you’re able at a basic level to see, monitor every circuit in your home and control every circuit in your home.
And then there’s different sizes of them and different functionality and different brands. We use the SPAN smart panel, which is one of the innovators and originators of a full main service smart panel, and it allows folks to leverage that to understand what’s going on in their home and then to make decisions based on that.
Can smart Panels Help to Save Energy?
Maher: Okay. And how does a smart panel help a homeowner to improve energy efficiency and get potential cost savings?
Sadler: I think one of the biggest things is just understanding. A lot of folks don’t even look at their electric bill. They just get auto-paid and then one day they look at it and say, “Oh, my gosh, we’re spending this much a month,” or in a year, “on electricity? How? Why? We’re never home,” or, “the kids are gone,” or whatever the case may be.
But then they look at it and they don’t have any way to quantify it. Where is that coming from? Why is it so much? And SPAN allows you to do that. And then once you have more information, you’re able to make decisions, like, do we need to have the heat at X temperature or the AC at X temperature? And then we just leave with it on that temperature.
Maybe we can start to control and schedule our heating and cooling a little bit. Or finding out that an appliance, maybe a refrigerator that’s end-of-life, it just continues to cycle and cycle and cycle and it’s going to die, so it might help you make decisions on antiquated or aging out appliances and it’s time for a new one and that will save you some money.
Old Appliances Using Too Much Electricity
Maher: Right. It’s using twice as much electricity now as it should be, as a brand new one would be. So we can save a lot of money by just replacing the refrigerator.
Sadler: Absolutely. Yeah. And then what’s cool about the SPAN smart panel is that you’re able to control those circuits, too. So, for instance, if you’re not home and at work or if you’re away as well and you say, oh my gosh, I left the heat on 72 and we’re gone. So you’re able to either, you can turn that off or you can have control remotely from your circuits as well.
Other things you might have, well pumps, you might have left the pool pump on, you’re like, we’re not even there, or it doesn’t need to be on now, and things like that. So those are ways you can have some more control. But I think the learning for the homeowner as well as the equipment itself learning and understanding different frequencies, things plugged into the wall that run out of frequency, it might say, is that a fan? And they’re like, yeah, I got a fan plugged in.
I left the dehumidifier on. Oh my gosh, I’m just going to shut that off. So there’s opportunities for the learning, to allow you to make decisions that would help you save money that way, as well.
How Does a Smart Panel Integrate with Solar Panels?
Maher: Okay. And then how does a smart panel integrate with a solar energy system on your house?
Sadler: So, installing a smart panel is basically what we would call a panel swap, meaning we’re going to remove your gray box or your current main service panel. And so we disconnect all the wires from your breakers in the panel and remove the panel, then install the SPAN panel and re-land all those same wires and breakers and then organize it how the customer sees fit and what makes sense and make sure the system is balanced. And then it’s commissioning it.
So, you have to be a certified installer in order to have the ability to install one and to commission it, which means now we’re setting that up with the app and then setting some different parameters. So if you have, for solar, for instance, the solar system’s going to land in the main service panel and be what’s called a back fed breaker, meaning it’s going to flow back through the panel and then out to the grid if you’re overproducing.
If you have a battery or EV charges, we also want to land all those things in the main service panel, which, A, gives you the monitoring and the relationships of all that energy system. So now the monitoring for the SPAN is taking the information from solar, the information from the grid, the information from your home, the information from your battery system, your EV charging, and putting it all into one place. And you can see that relationship across the board.
So, the typical installation is really a panel swap and then the commissioning, and training and working with the homeowners to make sure they understand what they have and what they’re looking at, and then how they can make those decisions. If you have a battery system, you’re able to also have what’s called automatic load shedding.
So, we can prioritize circuits on the app from must-to-have, nice-to-have, and non-essential. So in an outage, it’s automatically going to drop the non-essential and nice-to-have circuits and going to give you your must-haves. So this heat, your refrigerator, a cooking option, as well as pretty much all your lights and outlets. And then you can then see how much battery life you have left in the SPAN app, based on what’s going on right now, and make informed decisions about any other loads or circuits you want to bring on.
And you can bring those nice-to-haves up on the app and it turns them on and brings them back up. And then you might see that that lifespan of the battery changes and you say, okay, maybe we’ll lose that one or lose this one. And then it automatically drops the non-essential, which should be things that you don’t need in an outage, pool pump, your jacuzzi, your AC, especially in the winter time or even in the summer a lot of times we want to take the AC off, electric dryers, any high load options that are going to drain the battery quicker, we will normally just remove those on the non-essential automated load shedding, as well.
Smart Electrical Panels And Battery Backups
Maher: So in the event of a power outage and you have a battery backup system, you’re able to make some informed decisions, like you said, okay, the power company says that we’re going to be back up in a couple of hours, so we’ve got plenty of capacity, we can keep the TV on and whatever, or yeah, geez, the power company thinks we’re not going to be back up until tomorrow morning, so we got to save everything we can, shut off these lights, shut off the TV and just only use the essentials or something like that. So you have that ability to make those informed decisions when you have the information.
Sadler: Yeah. And it gives you real-time information, so based on exactly what you’re doing now, what’s on, then you see what your remaining battery life and capacity is, and make those decisions. That’s why I always joke around with folks, like, in an outage, you can’t cook a Turkey and you can’t sit in front of your fridge and with the fridge doors open and decide what I want to eat and drink.
So, you got to probably be more of an energy miser with your heating, have a plan when you go in the fridge, and try to keep everything as low as possible to expand that capacity. But the SPAN panel is going to give you exact numbers on what that looks like. And then again, like you said, make those decisions to expand the capacity. Or if you find out the utility says it’s going to be on an hour, just, I guess let it rip and just carry on the way you want to be, and you know that you got it.
Can Smart Electrical Panels Integrate With Other Smart Systems?
Maher: Can a smart panel be integrated with other types of smart home devices or systems, as well?
Sadler: Yes, which is really cool. And that’s ever-expanding. Another cool feature about smart panels and SPAN in particular is that it kind of grows. So they add features and benefits over time through over-the-air updates. And so it works with Alexa and Google Home. If it doesn’t work with Apple Home now, that’s probably coming soon.
A lot of those smart home platforms, it integrates with. And then of course, the SPAN panel works with the Mitsubishi heat pumps with their Sumo cloud, and there’s an interaction there that you’re able to leverage some control and energy savings. Again, similar type of stuff for load control and not using as much, or shutting down a battery or using too much draw on your service as it is, especially in an outage, things like that. So it’s continuing to grow, but there’s a lot more interaction through those smart home platforms, as well.
What is the Lifespan of a Smart Electrical Panel?
Maher: Is there a typical lifespan on a smart electrical panel or are these panels kind of like any other electrical panel, where it can last for decades?
Sadler: Yeah, we’d expect it to last for decades, but the one difference, the big difference, and what makes it smart, is that system, the computer system. So it has a fan and basically a computer system inside, it’s the brains of the operation.
And that would be a similar thing. That’s the failure point, right? So in the main service panel portion of it, it’s a bus bar, it’s breakers, there’s no moving parts, it’s not doing anything, and short of an electrical short or… Most of it is usually contract or install error that leads to a flaw in the panel.
It’s usually they’re pretty solid. In this case, it’s the same thing, you just have a computer as well. But again, the SPAN panel has a 10-year warranty and everything’s covered. The first two years, they cover labor for us as a certified installer, a pro partner to go and take care of anything that needs to be taken care of.
And then SPAN has a tremendous customer support and most of these companies do have some type of remote customer support where they have a higher level of visibility than even the customer does, and can see what’s going on and know exactly what is needed, if anything. But we found that there’s been very low… We haven’t had a failure. And then in terms of issues, I think we might’ve only had one out of hundreds that we’ve installed, that has needed any type of service. Most of the time, it’s just operator error or a misunderstanding about the app or what they’re seeing, and things like that.
What is the Learning Curve for Smart Electrical Panels?
Maher: Do you find that there’s a little bit of a learning curve for homeowners when they get these installed and it takes them a little while to sort of understand how to use it? Or is it pretty easy to use and understand?
Sadler: I think it’s pretty easy to use and understand. And I would say that as a default, most of the customers that are going with a smart panel, they want it, they have a baseline understanding. They know what it is. In some cases, we’ve told customers that, hey, doing this battery system or adding EV and adding these different peripherals to your solar system, are going to mean additional electrical work that costs this much.
Why don’t we just do… The SPAN panel would mitigate all that and at least you get something for this added investment you’re making. And again, the SPAN panel does qualify for the 30% federal tax credit when it’s done with solar or with storage. So you’re getting more, so it brings it back down to what you would’ve paid just for adding extra gray boxes to make your battery system work.
So, it tends to be a lot of benefit that’s realized out of getting it, but it’s pretty simple, I would say. It’s got a simple-looking interface that shows the power flow between all of your energy system, and then you can look at individual circuits and it will show you exactly how much power they’re using, or you can switch it to monetizing it and showing how much money it’s costing you, which is a new feature they added this year.
Or you can look at it as your main service panel. So, if you’re used to looking at it as your main service panel, you can see the same information in that layout, which is kind of what I usually use, is looking at it, because it’s just easier for me to understand, I guess, that, okay, I’m a double breaker there for the heat pump and the EV charger and Solar’s over here. And so, you can kind of see exactly how it would be in your main service panel.
So, we’ve had our onsite team that installs the product, stays with the customer after, and makes sure that when they commission it, they accept the email, they set the app up, and then they go over it with them. So we found that a little bit of handholding and going through it and the basic setup, goes a long way as the customers seem to really understand it pretty easily.
Information About Solaris Renewables
Maher: All right, well, that’s all really great information, Brian. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Sadler: Thanks, John. Appreciate it.
Maher: And for more information, you can visit Solaris Renewables website at SolarisRenewables.com or call 781 270 6555.