Many of our solar customers decide to add in the Span smart panel to replace their current breaker panel. The Span panel does several things, one of which is to track the usage of each breaker in your home and then show that usage to you on Span’s app. Check it out www.span.io.

The really cool thing about Span, or any smart panel, is a thing called Energy Management Systems (EMS). The reason its so cool is that everything is electrifying so each building is using more and more electricity but each building can only use so much electricity at once. Imagine a future where everyone has an electric car and electric heating and cooling. Imagine a home that has 2 electric vehicles that need charging on a hot day, the air conditioning is blasting, the cars are charging, and now someone gets into the shower and another person turns on the clothes washer, at that point you may be using more energy than the home can handle. The solution is that by using EMS your home will react and turn something down, first it would reduce the energy to the car chargers and might even shut them off entirely, then maybe throttle the water heater. Then, after the shower is over the car charger powers back up, and this all happens without any manual intervention.

As we electrify our lives unique challenges arise that without creativity could cost homeowners a lot of money. Instead of adding more electric service to every home we can use EMS to dynamically respond to shifting energy usage automatically.

Here at Universal Electric & Solar PNW we encourage our customers to think about the future and prepare for it pro-actively. When adding solar to your home it's an opportunity to think about the rest of your home and how it uses electricity too. If you have an old breaker panel that already needs replacing then we can help leverage government incentives to reduce the cost of installing a new Smart panel that future-proofs your home. So, before you make another major decision about your home contact Universal Electric & Solar PNW to get the best advice. www.universalelectricpnw.com