Do You Need a SPAN Smart Electrical Panel?

The SPAN smart electrical panel is likely to play a significant role in the home electrification movement in the coming years. That’s because, for all the talk about the exciting future of home electrification, two big challenges need to be addressed before the whole world can go electric.

The first involves utility companies’ concern about too many homes switching to electric heating, electric cooking, and EV charging too quickly for the grid to handle. The resulting strain on the grid would require expensive infrastructure upgrades that customers and utility companies would have to share the cost of.

The second is at the homeowner’s end where a fairly antiquated piece of technology currently sits at the heart of most homes’ electrical management systems. That technology is the lowly home electrical panel and the hard truth is that it’s probably not up to the task of managing the electrical load of a modern solar-powered, battery-backed, EV-equipped, heat-pump-cooled home.

The SPAN smart electrical panel may be the solution to both of these challenges.

What is a SPAN Smart Electrical Panel?

A SPAN Smart Electrical Panel is a revolutionary electrical panel that gives homeowners much more control and visibility over their home’s energy consumption. It can manage EV chargers, electric heat pumps, water heaters, heat pump dryers, and other power-hungry household appliances so that they don’t all draw power from the grid at the same time.

This load management capability is crucial to the home electrification movement because it allows a home’s total electrical load to be kept below a certain level by making critical second-by-second decisions as to how much power a given appliance can draw at any one time.

Many electrical appliances don’t need to have a constant, uninterrupted source of power. Take your electric vehicle, for instance. You might plug it in to charge overnight when you get in from work but, as long as it’s sufficiently charged by morning, you’re not concerned about how or when that charging takes place.

Now let’s say that, after you plug your car in, you go into the house and start preparing dinner (on your electric induction stove, of course). Oh, and shoot! You just remembered that one of your kids is going to need their soccer gear washed before tomorrow’s game, so you quickly throw in a load of laundry.

Oh, and by the way, it. happens to be summertime so the air conditioning is on, too. And that hot bath you like to take after dinner is only hot because you have a hot water heat pump heating the water well ahead of time.

So now you have five major appliances running, each drawing a ton of power. Do that with a traditional electrical panel with a 100 amp service and you’re going to trip a circuit breaker.

You could upgrade your panel to a 150 or amp service (or even higher) to take into account your increased electricity consumption. But what if you could just do a better job of managing and timing the use of those appliances so that you can still have all the electricity you need, whenever you need it, without having that expensive upgrade?

A SPAN smart electrical panel can help you to accomplish that. For example, it might realize that you always start dinner as soon as you get in from work and decide not to start charging the car until later.

It might also realize that the laundry needs to be done before tomorrow’s game but doesn’t need to be done while you’re cooking dinner. Maybe the washing machine can start automatically after you turn the stove off, leaving you plenty of time to throw the load into the dryer after you’ve had your bath.

And while you like the house to be cool, do you really need the A/C on in the bedroom while you’re preparing dinner downstairs in the kitchen?. Maybe the smart panel could turn it down for 30 minutes upstairs and automatically turn it up again before you go to bed.

How a SPAN Smart Electrical Panel Helps Utility Companies

What if we took that scenario I just painted of a few hours early evening electricity usage in an average home and multiplied it by a million? That’s what has utility companies worried about full-home electrification.

Arch Rao, CEO of Span.IO, is the former head of Tesla’s energy storage division, and spent years integrating solar panels, Powerwall batteries, and other distributed energy resources with homeowners’ electric panels.

While he recognized the crucial role the ubiquitous panels played in connecting each home’s electrical circuit to the grid, he was frustrated at how antiquated the technology was. He thought the electric panel had the potential to be so much more than just a passive current protection device and set about creating a company that would deliver on that promise.

That was back in 2018 and now SPAN Smart Electrical Panels have been installed in thousands of homes, gathering second-by-second data on how homes are using all major circuits.

What they have found is that total electricity consumption rarely surpasses 80 amps, and such peak events last on average 12 minutes. 48 million homes in the US are served by a 100 amp electric panel and it seems likely that even those could go fully electric without the need for a service upgrade if they had SPAN Smart Electric Panel.

And the data gets better. By combining the granular energy demand records of multiple households in a single neighborhood, utility companies can identify the exact times when local grid usage is spiking. This data is helping utilities to better manage regional electricity demand and plan for future energy needs.

Conclusion

Overall, the SPAN Smart Electrical Panel is revolutionizing the way we use electricity by providing homeowners companies with granular insight into their energy consumption and empowering utilities to make smarter decisions about our shared energy resources.

It’s a crucial component in the move to a smarter, more efficient home energy system.