In this episode, John Maher speaks with Brian Sadler, Vice President at Solaris Renewables, and Corrigan Harreys, Senior Sales Manager at SPAN, about SPAN’s innovative smart electric panels. They discuss how SPAN’s panel transforms energy management by providing detailed usage insights, detecting energy-hogging appliances, and integrating seamlessly with solar panels and storage batteries. With features like automatic load management and app-based controls, SPAN helps homeowners cut costs and extend battery life during outages. Learn more about SPAN’s impact on efficient and resilient home energy systems. For more information, visit Solaris Renewables or SPAN.
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. And today our topic is Solar Energy and the SPAN Smart Electric Panel. Welcome, Brian.
Brian Sadler: Hi, John. Good to be with you today.
Maher: Yeah, thanks. And our special guest today is Corrigan Harreys, Senior Sales Manager at SPAN, makers of smart electrical panels and EV chargers. Welcome, Corrigan. Thanks for joining us.
Corrigan Harreys: Yeah, thanks, John, thanks, Brian. Look forward to chatting today.
What is a Smart Electrical Panel?
Maher: Absolutely. So, Corrigan, what is a smart electrical panel for those who might not really understand what that means, and how does SPAN’s design anticipate and accommodate for future energy needs in a home?
Harreys: Yeah, for sure. And when you think about electrical panels at our core, especially for us in the Northeast, it’s typically your gray box down in the basement, maybe if the home’s a bit newer, it’s in the garage, and typically it’s the last piece of analog technology in the home. And so, when you think about renewable energy, electrification, EVs, EV charging at home, heat pumps, all this new technology flowing through a panel, but it’s almost always the last piece of archaic or analog technology in the home.
And so, if you think about fundamentally as homeowners make that journey, if all this new technology is flowing through a panel, why is it not the smartest piece in the home, right? And so, for us, we look at that and said, again, foundationally, every home’s infrastructure should be smart, and so you do that starting with a panel.
And so yes, we’re a smart panel. Really, we’re a whole home energy management system, so we’re going to give homeowners deep insights into their electrical usage control over those loads in their home, but also the understanding of, “Hey, I’ve got rooftop solar or I have a storage system, how do I understand that side of the production and then what I’m storing and how I can use it most effectively within my home during an outage or if there’s an on-grid virtual power plant scenario going on as well?”
What Insights can SPAN Energy Systems Provide?
Maher: Okay. So, talk a little bit more about the types of insights that homeowners can gain from SPAN’s energy usage data.
Harreys: Yeah, at its core, whether or not you have a solar system tied in with SPAN, a homeowner is going to get day, week, month, year usage per circuit. And when you think about electrical rates, unfortunately they’re kind of going one way, which is typically up, and usually after maybe mortgage or rent or insurance, your electric bill ends up being your highest monthly or annual cost that you’re going to have if you look kind of long-term. And so, we’ve really dialed in SPAN to give a homeowner that usage per circuit so they can understand what’s going to add up to that larger bill that you get at the end of the month and that total cost over the year, right?
And so, one of the cool things we added, because historically we’ve done percentage of your bill, what’s your dishwasher, what’s your HVAC, what’s your EV charger, and what is that in terms of kilowatt-hours?
Last week we actually just launched cost savings insights where now we can actually have a homeowner input their electrical rate and then we’re going to give them exactly how much each of those circuits or loads or appliances, however they want to look at it, how much those are costing them so they can really see what’s going to stack up to that bill at the end of the month.
On the side if you have a solar system installed, we’re also going to give you a really simple usable graph of how much solar you’re producing, again, day, week, month, year, so you can really track your production versus your consumption or your usage and show that comparison to ensure you only want to be ideally paying your solar panel bill, not your electric bill, both, right? So, how do you ensure that you’re using that energy efficiently, but also understanding in your home maybe what’s the next update or where can I be more efficient in my day-to-day usage?
Sadler: I think we found too that customers are blown away that have the SPAN on, A, the depth of the data that they can get, but then what the guilty parties are because they might have thought that, oh, it’s definitely my heat, or it’s definitely… it’s all the EV that’s using it up, and then they find other… maybe they have an older fridge that’s just cycling all the time, and that becomes an energy hog that it’s going all the time, and that the data’s able to show you that it’s probably time to replace it with a new or more efficient appliance and things like that.
And I think SPAN does a great job of the interface is simple and informative, but you can go as deep as you want to go. Like Corrigan was saying, you can get into the day and look at the graph in the day or the week or the month or the year and really dig into data as far as you want to take it. But a lot of homeowners have been super impressed with what they learn from having a SPAN.
SPAN Home App
Harreys: Yeah, and it’s all in a really simple form factor, what we call the SPAN Home app, right? So, you’ll get an app when you have your SPAN panel, and it’s a very simple usable app for a homeowner to use and understand their insights, right? And it’s one of those things, people have gone and gotten smart thermostats or smart doorbells, and it’s like you once lived without it, but now you can’t.
And when you give this sort of data, it’s very powerful to understand what’s happening in your home when you’re there, when you’re not there, and where you can look at the ghost phantom loads are a real thing. That dehumidifier could be a big energy hog in the summer. You just never think that that one thing could be impacting your bill that much.
Actionable Items People Find from SPAN Smart Electric Panels
Maher: What are some of the other actionable items that people tend to find? You just mentioned the energy hog types of appliances like, oh, just my refrigerator is 10 years old and it’s really hogging a lot of electricity, or maybe it’s my air conditioner or whatever. What are some of the typical things that people see, and what are the actionable items that they can take in order to try to fix those things and save on their electricity bills?
Harreys: Yeah, a lot of those are your basic large appliances, like you mentioned. Heating and cooling is a core one, right? It’s pretty wild when we’ve heard some of the homeowner feedback that they didn’t understand that that thirteen-year-old central air system could really be 60% of their bill in the summer, and they go and replace it, and it’s like, oh, this should have been 20% the entire time.
So, it’s really those large loads like your heating and cooling, like potentially your older heat pump up water heater for those that kind of adopted those things early. Obviously, the basement or garage fridge is another one that we’ve heard and we all talk about because everyone’s got that, quote-unquote, “party fridge” that’s filled two or three times a year, but no one ever changes the dial from 10 back down to 1 when it’s empty. It’s really finding those older appliances that maybe you’ve been putting off, but the ROI potentially is there, and SPAN kind of brings that up into the forefront for them to see of what’s that next project they should do as a homeowner that’s really going to save them some money.
Sadler: The humidifier that you brought, that’s a huge one because the people plug it in and forget it, like I just need to keep it dry down there, and even as if they go and dump it out, if it’s got the pan in it, and when you get the SPAN, you can see how much that really uses. I think that is eye-opening for sure.
Harreys: Yeah, in the Northeast, yeah, your dehumidifier in the summer and then your plug-in space heater in the winter, right? We’re all guilty of those. It’s wild how much energy those tiny little appliances can actually use.
Safety Benefits of a SPAN Smart Panel
Maher: Are there safety benefits to a SPAN smart panel as well because compared to a traditional panel?
Harreys: Yeah, I mean, you think about a traditional panel, right? There’s obviously if you’re going from a… if it’s as old as a Federal Pacific or Zinsco or just a service upgrade, you’re putting safety measures with a new panel every time. Your electrician is going to take a look at that, bring it up to code.
With SPAN, we like to say we take it a step further where you have a check engine light for your car, SPAN becomes that, quote-unquote, “check engine light” for your home so that on the solar side, maybe a module’s out and you don’t realize it because the data’s not upfront. But if you’re in a high producing summer season and you’re producing half of what you did last year or half of what you did last month, you’re going to see that data pretty quickly that hey, maybe there’s something wrong.
Think about your appliances, we just talked about fridges. If a fridge dies and it’s filled with food, you’re not only losing the fridge, you’re losing all the food in it, and that expense becomes pretty high. So, it’s going to bring those kind of insights and usage statistics up front of, hey, your HVAC spiking, or hey, you’re not pulling anything from your fridge, have someone come out and look at those things. It’s always ideal if you can fix it rather than get something new, or we talked about maybe it is time to get something new. So, we’re going to bring that check engine light, so to speak, to every homeowner that’s got a SPAN panel installed.
Solar Energy and the SPAN Smart Panel
Maher: So, let’s talk about solar energy, and a lot of obviously the Brian’s customers at Solaris Renewables have solar panels on their roof or they’re considering getting solar panels on the roof, and maybe they want to integrate that along with a SPAN smart panel. What are the advantages of that, and how do the two systems tie together?
Harreys: Yeah, I mean, one of the nice things about SPAN is that we can monitor and give a homeowner any solar production based off the inverter and modules on the roof, right? The core thing for us, and Brian will know this from his team on the more technical side, we just need that solar breaker landed in SPAN, and we’re kind of off and running.
So, one, we’re just going to present them that really simple data of their solar production, and then also understanding, hey, here’s your usage per circuit so that unfortunately energy is not completely limitless and free once you put solar on. Here’s how you can manage your regular world to ensure that you’re using less than you’re producing on the roof to ensure you’re not getting that electric bill after the fact.
I think the other part is a big growth, and Brian can speak to this, is just the growth of storage in the industry and in the Northeast and within the Solaris business. When you invest in a battery, you should be getting the most out of that investment. And for us, we give a battery system 40% longer battery life with 100% more flexibility, we like to say, because we have a really sleek integration with four main battery manufacturers where a homeowner can pick and choose which circuits they want on and off during an outage.
And I think really one of the biggest things is we give them days, hours, minutes of how much battery life they have. So, when you’re in an outage, 20%, right? Think about your own cell phone, could be 10 minutes, could be two hours depending on how and what you’re using. So, with SPAN giving that upfront time, it’s a very easy, again, data point for a homeowner to digest, but then also they can move circuits around within the Home app to ensure they elongate the life of the battery to get through the night so that the solar can recharge the battery in the morning.
So, it’s really, again, in our opinion, the centerpiece between the rooftop solar system and the battery, SPAN seamlessly blends all the features and benefits that you want out of both of those system really cleanly.
Simple Solar Interface
Sadler: Yeah, it does a really nice job of showing a simple interface and the power flow of between home solar, the grid, your energy storage system, if you do have a battery system, and your EV, if you have an EV and a SPAN EV charger as well, so you can see the actual relationship between all of them. And then if you want to dig into the data further, you can get pretty granular on it, as well as even I think you can even pull reports now as well, I believe, right? Which is…
Solar Panels and EV Chargers
Harreys: Yeah, one of the other kind of new tidbits in the Home app we just added was that data download, as well as to your point, thanks for bringing up our EV charger. If you have excess solar production and you have a SPAN and a SPAN Drive installed, we can actually charge the car directly via excess solar production now. So, it’s taken, again, that seamless kind of orchestration of integration one step further and letting the homeowners have at it with all the data insights and control that otherwise it’s still kind of a manual process.
Sadler: So then when we find, generally speaking, when folks go solar, they kind of fall into one of two buckets. They either become super energy misers and they’re trying to really maximize their solar potential and beat the utility, right? And then the other ones, the other camp is, “I got solar, so it’s all handled, right? So, I can now plug everything in and leave the windows open and crush the AC, and I’m good to go.”
And so, it’s funny that when customers, especially in the latter camp call in and be like, “Hey, I don’t think my solar is working. I just got a $300 electric bill, and I used to cover it or come close to cover it,” and we dig into it, and if they have a SPAN that’s where you can really shine light on, “Well, look at how you’re using this or this circuit or this one or this group of circuits or these. You’re heating, cooling. What do you keep your cooling at?” They’re like, “Oh, 65.” “Well, I mean, that’s probably why.”
Maher: You just doubled your energy usage, so of course it’s not like the solar panels are not going to keep up.
Sadler: Exactly. So we find a lot of folks that fall into that camp, do, like their usage literally can double fairly easily because the mindset of like, “Okay, we have solar now, it’s all covered,” when there’s limitations which we work on with all customers on the parameters on how solar works and what the parameters are for your maximum, and trying to match it to your electric bill or your growth, and SPANs great for that, for growth items or new construction and new homes, major renovations that they added on a bunch.
And we try to thread the needle best we can, maybe oversize the system a little bit to allow for some growth, but then they really have the data to say, “Yeah, it’s time for the EV because we have this additional power,” or “We’re thinking about going to heat pumps, but now we know our solar system will cover the heat pumps because SPAN is telling us.”
So, it’s been a super useful tool for us, a troubleshooting, managing growth on different projects for newer homes or major renovations, things like that. And then, as Corrigan pointed out, storage, I mean, is SPAN with a storage system or battery system is unbelievable in terms of how it can mitigate additional electrical work that may need to happen. It gives the customer so much control, even when you’re not at home.
So, folks that are traveling or have another property, things like that, they lose power, they can manage the length of time that battery will back up to keep their heat even if it’s at 50 degrees so pipes won’t freeze, things like that. There’s a lot that can be done with the automatic load shedding those criteria, like Corrigan pointed out, but also individually managing those circuits to elongate the life of the battery if that’s the move or turn on circuits that you need because it’s an emergency situation, you want to have those circuits on. So, it really leverages the usability of your home and your property and all your energy systems.
How to Install a SPAN Smart Panel
Maher: Yeah, so what’s the process of installing a SPAN smart panel, especially for those who might already have or who are considering solar panels on their roof?
Harreys: Yeah, I mean, I think from some of the core foundations of our engineering team in the product was don’t reinvent the installation wheel, so to speak. So, we have a lot of features and benefits packed in our panel that are not there for a traditional panel, but we wanted to make it as installer friendly as possible, right? So, from that wiring perspective, it’s the same as a traditional panel. You’re going to go down, you’re going to open it, you’re still going to see your traditional one-inch breakers in SPAN, which is unique. All of our technology lies kind of in what we call the backplate of our panel, right? All of the technology is built in there. When an electrician goes into wire it, it’s going to be just like that traditional panel.
And that’s important to us, so that from a cost perspective, it’s really, you can pay for analog technology or you can pay for the SPAN panel itself. Your installation is going to be there no matter what. And so, we always say do it once, do it right. If you have electrical work, get as much value out of that electrical work as possible and set yourself up for the future, whether it’s with solar and there’s a storage add on in the future or a heat pump or EV add-on, right? Put that foundational building block there for you as the homeowner to do your, we say electrification journey, because there’s different steps people take over the course of three or five years.
Sadler: Yeah, it’s huge for being in terms of the basic bones of it as a bus bar, the land breakers on, right? You bring your wires in you land, and it’s awesome because we can do these large renovation projects or new construction, and we can provide early on in the project long before we’re ready to come install solar or batteries or any other peripheral devices. We can bring a SPAN panel, and their electrician because any electrician can wire the SPAN, right?
And then because we’re a certified installer, we’re the ones that are going to commission to make it a smart panel, and then help the customer learn how they can manage their circuits and leverage the functionality of SPAN with their other energy systems.
But it’s a huge advantage that it doesn’t require any special training or special equipment or specific breakers that are only for SPAN or anything like that. It’s a standard, compatible breakers, like Corrigan pointed out, which is a huge deal.
So, I was just at a site earlier where I had that conversation like, “We’re going to bring you the box, and you’re going to be able to hang the box, land your wires, your circuits, we’ll help you strategize on organization of which circuit’s going to land here versus there, things like that.” But just electricians, they’re going to look at this as a normal project. And then once it’s all done and the other pieces of the construction build have come into play, we’re coming back with our team that’s going to commission it, help the customer learn how to use the app and the functionality of it, prioritize circuits for load shedding and labeling it.
And it’s a really slick commissioning and setup for the interaction with the homeowner, and they’re always so excited to see how it works and how they can see all their circuits in one place, and it’s labeled and it’s dynamic, and you can actually see power in real time moving throughout your circuit breakers and your board. And it’s really a tremendous advantage over a standard… We just call it the gray box. You can have the gray box, or you can have the sexy white box that’s smart. So, it’s been really cool to see the evolution of SPAN as well.
Cost Saving Potential with SPAN Smart Panels
Maher: Corrigan, can you talk a little bit about potential costs savings that homeowners might be able to see and recognize if they install a SPAN smart panel? I mean, obviously a panel’s a panel. If they don’t make any changes to their electrical usage, they’re not going to see any cost savings. But with all of the data that they’re getting, if they are able to make some changes to their energy usage, what’s sort of typical?
Harreys: Yeah, and there’s two kind of aspects to think about with cost savings because there’s the actionable insights you can take, which I’ll chat about, but sometimes on the upfront side, there are some pretty high infrastructure costs, so to speak, for a homeowner to go put in a full level two EV charger or add a heat pump to their home, right?
So, we’re in New England, there’s a lot of 100-amp homes that have homes that are built in the ’40s or ’50s and they still have that 100 amp service. And so, it may be a natural gas or oil home, and a homeowner’s ready to kind of start there, again, that term electrification journey where if you go to add a full level two EV charger, which is give or take 48-amps. If you add a heat pump system, that could be another 40 or 50-amps, right? So, your service size can get tapped out, and that’s where the high cost could be if you have an underground service where you’re going to be paying to dig up the yard, do the trench, bring in the bigger wires for your 200 or 400-amp service.
And so, SPAN as an energy management system, we have a feature set built in called PowerUp where we can actually manage those loads for a homeowner, so they could stay at 100-amps, but add one or two EV chargers, add that heat pump. And that’s where when those scenarios come up, we’re actually upfront a cost savings for the homeowner right away, because especially if it’s underground, we’re going to be less than that digging or trenching.
In the scenario where a homeowner puts it in and there looking long term, right? It’s understanding where and how you’re using your energy. We could all be better. It’s just we don’t know where to be better, and as rates go up, we have to be a bit more efficient with our usage. So again, it’s looking for those ghost or phantom loads we talk about. Peak rates or time of use rates will eventually, they are on the West Coast, right? Things start in California, and we’ll say they end up over here. We’re going to start to have to learn that, hey, from 5:00 to 9:00 PM your rate might be double. So, you can start to look at how you act in your normal life to be as efficient with your electrical usage as possible.
But then also we talked about before, looking for those next areas to update. There’s always that project we’ve unfortunately maybe been putting off a bit on whether it’s heating or cooling or the fridge or the washer-dryer or even windows for that matter. And that’s going to give you some actionable insights on what’s going to give you the best ROI. And there’s a lot of great tax incentives out there and the Inflation Reduction Act that you can also tie in with your SPAN install, but also those other upgrades that I mentioned there as well.
SPAN Panels and EV Charging
Sadler: Something I was thinking that about the EV charging, you touched on adding a couple EVs to 100-amp service for instance. Some of that’s possible because of the functionality of the SPAN integrated EV charges where they can actually throttle back the power, and you can go up to 48-amps, like you mentioned, which is really a 60-amp breaker for the over cover protection. But if you have, on 100-amp service in particular, and you turn the range into electric range, instead of it just shutting off the EV charging, which you might be expecting to go pick up the kids or do whatever you’re going to do and take a ride, now it would actually throttle that back. So, you’re still getting some EV charging, at the same time, you’re still able to cook Thanksgiving day dinner and such.
Harreys: Yeah, exactly. And that’s that orchestration I mentioned before where we do like to integrate with other products, right? So, we integrate with four battery manufacturers. We have our own EV charger that we throttle. We also have an integration partnership with Mitsubishi, so we can throttle one of their heat pump series as well, their Mini Splits series. And it’s all in terms of having a homeowner have a really good experience if and when those events occur, right?
They’re rare, but when they do, we want it to be a really fluid experience like where Brian mentioned you turn on the range, maybe you have the washer-dryer going too. We don’t want to just turn off your car. We want to give it some level of charge to the car. And so, as an energy management system, if we can help kind of orchestrate that, it just makes it such a user-friendly experience for the homeowner.
Can the SPAN Smart Panel Integrate with Any Solar Panels?
Maher: Speaking of integration, can the SPAN smart panel integrate with any brand of solar panels as well?
Harreys: Yeah, the rooftop PV, again, that system won’t really matter for us. The biggest thing is on really installation side, like Brian mentioned. As long as that solar breaker is landed in SPAN, we can monitor that solar production really cleanly.
On the battery side, right, we can integrate with a Tesla Powerwall 3, a Franklin Whole Home, SolarEdge and phase battery systems. Those are really… I’ll let Brian speak to the core kind of batteries out there in the market, and we create that really fluid backup scenario for a homeowner to see duration in a time aspect of how much that battery’s going to last. But then they can also… I’m done with the outdoor lights, I’ll move those into the non-essential bucket. So, we can create that fluid and flexible experience. Again, to get that 40% more battery life is huge, right? It’s an investment to make. Get as much out of that battery as possible. And that’s really our goal in that outage experience.
Sadler: Which is huge because we have to design all of our storage systems at the fail-safe of battery only with no solar, no solar to charge them. So, all the limitations are based on that capacity. And if we can expand that capacity, again, not only a better user experience and homeowner experience, but could be safety or in all the more catastrophic weather events that we see now between in winter and blizzards and hurricanes in the summer and fall, excuse me, then every kilowatt-hour you can squeeze out of capacity, usable capacity by leveraging the SPAN load management, it’s a huge deal.
Harreys: Yeah, and I think just thinking about our market right here in New England, again, we’re going to get a hurricane potentially. Knock on wood we don’t, but in the summer, we’ll get a blizzard in the winter, and the loads you might want during those seasons is going to differ. And that’s really hard, right? That’s a difference here is we kind of have to accommodate for four seasons. And if you can say, “Hey, the seasons don’t matter,” because you’re going to have the flexibility to choose the backup, that’s just a win-win for the homeowner.
Again, it’s hard day of to go and pick, “Hey, you got six circuits to back up,” ready to sign up for those six circuits, and it’s a hard decision because it’s like, what do I plan for? And also, life may change, right? Kids may come into the picture, kids may leave the picture. You may want different things backed up. So just to have that flexibility there in our market, I think, and just in any market on the second part of that comment is huge.
Sadler: That’s a huge point because normally a simple portable generator or a small battery system, you’re targeting those, quote-unquote, “essential loads.”
I know we learned early on from doing storage systems that we really want to flip it the other way and take the heavy loads off and give the customer the power and the control by using Whole Home, and just like, “Hey, be mindful that maybe you don’t cook a turkey or sit in front of the fridge and decide what you want to eat.” And then now it’s like AC is probably not going to happen. And so we want to set some good expectations and some limitations, but SPAN allows that to a whole other level by those prioritized automatic load shedding where they can drop everything down, see a really great picture of what they have for life left in that battery at their current usage, and then make decisions based on that, and bring things up. Or then they might go a little while and then shut some more things down, but they can see real time data to make those decisions, which is really huge, and it’s less limiting for when you’re adding a storage system for sure.
Maher: All right, well, that’s really great information. Thanks again for joining us, Corrigan, I appreciate it.
Harreys: Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks, John, thanks, Brian. Great chatting with you.
Sadler: Awesome, thank you.
Maher: And how can people learn a little bit more about SPAN, Corrigan?
More Information About SPAN
Harreys: Yeah, check out our website, it’s span.io, and it’s a great website. It’s got a ton of information as a homeowner, what to expect out of SPAN. We have a ton of great video and different content on there of real homeowner experiences of how SPAN’s impacted their life in different ways. So that’s a great resource. And obviously also check out our social, we put a ton of good stories on there of different installs and, again, further homeowner experience and features and benefits that we add constantly to the product.
Maher: And you can also learn more at the Solaris Renewables website at solarisrenewables.com or call (781) 270-6555.