Smart panels: What you need to know

A electrical panel (also called a breaker box) has two main jobs: Organize your home's circuits, and prevent electrical fires. It's a time-tested design, and works so well that most of us forget we have one in our homes.

Enter the “smart” electrical panel: With one of these Wi-Fi connected systems, you'll also be able track how much energy you're using around your house, and even control some of that energy use through a smartphone app.

It's actually more useful to think of smart panels as a type of "smart energy controller." These products can be incredibly valuable if you're installing a solar battery, or electrifying an older home (or both).

Most energy controllers aren't full electrical panels, but "smart panel" is by far the most Googled phrase in this category—so here we are. We'll help you wrap your head around the different options in this emerging category.

When we talk to people looking to make clean energy upgrades, they usually have the impression that a smart panel is like a souped-up smart home controller that can track your energy use and judiciously remote-control the power to their appliances and lights. It's true that smart panels do those things, but so can loads of less-expensive and easier-to-install products.

Smart panels are at their best when they're paired with solar batteries, or when they help you avoid a pricey electrical service upgrade to your home. That is, they make it easy to automatically cut back your energy use when it's necessary—and they also make it easy to adjust the rules behind those energy restrictions.

Different people in different homes will want to follow slightly different strategies to manage their energy most effectively. Luckily, smart panels come in a few different varieties.

Smart panel sub-types

The best-known smart panel, the Span, can completely replace your existing electrical panel. The Span can handle all the same fire-preventing, circuit-organizing jobs as the old breaker box—plus wireless monitoring and control for every single circuit in your home.

A handful of other brands sell full electrical panels that make it easy to add special wireless breakers or modules to certain circuits, plus some other pro-electrification benefits. Some of these products include the Leviton Load Center and Schneider Electric Pulse. (EnergySage is owned by Schneider Electric.)

The Span smart panel fully replaces an existing breaker box. It'll need to be filled with the same kind of standard circuit breakers as any traditional electrical panel. Image: Span

Other smart energy controllers aren't really panels at all—but can attach to your traditional (non-smart) breaker box. Energy Star calls them "home energy management systems," but the idea is the same: They accomplish a lot of the same goals as full smart panels, but on a smaller scale and generally at a lower price. If you don't need to put in an entire electrical panel as part of a new build or gut renovation, these controllers can make a lot of sense.

Lumin makes a sub-panel that "smartens" a dozen circuits in your main box, no additional circuit breakers required. Savant makes circuit-level modules that you can install alongside regular breakers in a regular box.

You could even argue that the smart load managers made by solar battery brands (including Enphase, SolarEdge, and others) also work a lot like smart panels, without quite as much flexibility or user control.

This is a fast-changing category, and it wouldn't be surprising if some other new, innovative products pop up in the next few years as well.

The Savant Power Module system works inside of traditional electrical panels. Each circuit that you'd like to turn smart will need its own module, connected to and sitting alongside standard circuit breakers. Image: Savant

Traditional electrical panels and circuit breakers typically last for decades with minimal maintenance. They’re made by venerable companies with decades of experience building reliable hardware, and robust networks of contractors who work with their products.

Smart panels and breakers on the other hand are a relatively new technology, and nobody can say with confidence how they’ll hold up over the same amount of time as an old-school breaker box. Most products are certified for safety by Underwriters Laboratory (UL), and satisfy the National Electrical Code. But what about spare parts, software support, and security patches? 

Some smart panels come from traditional hardware manufacturers with decades-long track records, which could bode well for longevity. But they don’t necessarily have much experience developing and maintaining consumer-facing software—like the smartphone apps that make the panels smart. That’s not to say they can’t do it, but it’s something that they haven’t proven yet.

On the other hand, new players like Span and Lumin have limited experience building hardware or working with contractors, and don’t have extensive track records on the consumer side anyway. It’s hard to say what this could mean in the long run.

What happens when the internet is out, or if the app is discontinued?

We don’t know of any smart panel manufacturers that have gone belly up—but some smart home brands have, and even the companies that survive sometimes stop supporting older gadgets. It’s not hard to imagine that some smart panels could lose their software support over time. 

The not-so-bad news is that no matter what happens, smart panels and breakers can just turn “dumb” when they’re unable to connect to the internet or a smartphone app. You’ll always still have a functional breaker box. One Span owner compared it to an escalator, which just turns into a staircase when it breaks.

Smart panels and energy managers are more versatile than energy monitors like the Sense or Emporia Vue, which track your energy use but can't control the power. 

Compared to device-level energy managers like the Lumin Edge system, or just a bunch of smart plugs, smart panels are centralized at your home’s power supply and can coordinate the flow of energy more effectively.

Smart home gadgets and appliances like the Nest thermostat or Tesla EV charger (to pick just two out of hundreds of examples) actually offer more control over your stuff than a smart panel does—the panel can’t change the temperature on the thermostat, or shut off individual outlets and lighting fixtures without additional hardware. 

If you’re getting a solar battery, a smart panels will maximize its flexibility and give you more control over how it works.

The key thing to remember: A solar battery often cannot power everything in your home all at once, or at least not for very long. 

One way to get around that is with multiple batteries, but that’ll easily cost five figures on top of the initial installation costs.

Instead, it's common to set up what's known as a critical load sub-panel. A limited number of important circuits will be connected to that sub-panel—fridge, kitchen outlets, HVAC, probably the entertainment center. The battery will only provide power to those circuits.

One big downside: If you change your mind about what you want to have hooked up to the battery, you’ll need to pay an electrician a few hundred bucks to rewire those types of sub-panels. As you gradually switch over to an electric car, stove, heat pump, and so on, those house calls can add up—and with limited slots for backup power, how do you prioritize everything?

Critical load sub-panels don't offer the smart, responsive tools you get with more modern solutions. These are the kinds of tricks that can stretch out you battery's run time, or even help save extra cash on your utility bills.

Smarter backup

A smart panel is a more flexible and arguably more elegant way to manage the kinds of compromises you'd be forced into with a critical load sub-panel.

The panel works like an air traffic controller for your home’s electrical system, keeping an eye on how much energy your battery can supply (the runway), and how much energy your appliances and electronics demand (the planes). 

You set the order of importance for your appliances and gadgets in an app, and the panel takes it from there.

After the critical circuits are covered, the panel might allow some nice-to-have circuits to kick on, as long as there’s enough juice to go around. As the energy demands shift—maybe you turned on an extra burner on the stove, or the heat pump kicked up to a higher setting—the smart panel can make adjustments to other circuits within milliseconds.

If you decide during a particular power outage that you’d rather power up your home office than the entertainment center, you can make that change in the app within seconds, no electrician required.

Surge-pricing savings

If your utility company has a time-of-use rate plan (aka surge pricing, where the cost of electricity skyrockets in the late afternoon and early evening) a smart panel could help you save even more money than a solar battery alone.

While surge pricing is in effect, the smart panel keeps an eye on your circuits and figures out how to run as much stuff as possible with the battery’s stored energy, while trying not to pull from the grid. In most setups, you can dip into grid power if you need it, but the panel can help you avoid it.

You don’t need a smart panel to prioritize the battery during peak demand, but it gives you more options. When you get a battery installed without a smart panel, you typically need to decide whether to favor the most possible savings on your energy bill, or the most reliable backup power. With the right smart-panel setup, you can quickly change your strategy through the app, and even pre-program those changes based on the time of day or other conditions.

And if you’re determined to use as little grid electricity as possible, a smart panel could actually be one of the most efficient ways to get there: Instead of adding extra solar panels and battery packs, a smart panel helps you squeeze extra efficiencies out of a smaller solar and storage setup. (Ask This Old House has a great video explainer on the topic, too.)

Finally, if you’re eligible to participate in a virtual power plant program (your battery feeds the grid in times of high demand), a smart panel can help coordinate the power flows there more effectively, too.

If you’re electrifying your home and your old panel can’t keep up with the new demand, a smart panel could be the cheapest, most convenient way to solve that problem.

It’s a challenge to run an all-electric house off of 100 amps of electrical service, as likely tens of millions of homes in the US currently have. So if your breaker box has “100A” printed on the big switch at the top, you’ll usually need to figure out a workaround before you can totally ditch fossil fuels, particularly if you live in a part of the US with cold winters.

The traditional workaround has been to get a service upgrade from the utility company, because it’s simple and straightforward. (This Old House, once again, has a great video on how this works.) The project will cost at least a couple thousand dollars, but for a lot of people, it’s the least-worst option.

Service upgrades aren’t always practical, though. If you need to excavate a sidewalk to access the service line, for example, it’ll be brutally expensive. Some utility companies also have a backlog of more than a year before they’ll be able to perform an upgrade. The whole thing can be a big mess. 

In those cases, a smart panel could be a faster, less expensive fix. 

In the same way that a smart panel can manage your circuits without overdrawing your solar battery, it can also manage your circuits overdrawing your entire electrical supply. 

So if you turn on one too many high-draw appliances—HVAC, induction stove, toaster oven, dryer, EV charger, curling iron, all on top of the fridge, TV, and lights—the smart panel will shut down one of the lower-priority circuits within milliseconds. That avoids tripping the main breaker, which would kill the power to your entire home.

Even some homes with 200 amps of service can butt up against their service limits if they have multiple HVAC units, EVs, a pool heater, and so on. A smart panel can help keep a lid on the energy use in that situation, too. 

Smart panels aren’t cheap, but neither are traditional electrical service upgrades, so you should get quotes for both options and compare. Not every smart panel is equipped to handle this kind of use case either, so you'll have to be sure to pick the right product.

There are plenty of other decent reasons to buy a smart panel, but they aren’t slam-dunks like the ones outlined above. If you were leaning toward a smart panel anyway, then sure, these can be fine extra reasons to shell out for one of these systems. Here are some of the most common ones we’ve come across: 

If you’re updating your electrical system anyway, you might as well future-proof your system by installing a smart panel—even without a battery, or other concrete use case. Sure. Or you could just wait until you actually need one, and then tack on a smart sub-panel or modular energy manager, tailored to whatever you need at the time. Something new and improved will probably come along in a few years anyway.

Smart panels can help you earn cash rewards and keep the electric grid stable during times of peak demand, in combination with demand-response programs. Yes, they can. So can individual smart-home devices, like thermostats and EV chargers, or modular energy managers on specific high-draw circuits. They’re cheaper and easier to install, and offer most of the same benefits for the grid. Solar batteries make the biggest difference here, with or without a smart panel.

You’ll save money on energy over time with a smart panel, even without a battery. Possibly. According to at least one Department of Energy Study, energy monitors and management systems can help homeowners trim their energy bills. People who know how they’re using energy tend to waste less of it. But even under optimistic energy-savings scenarios, it’ll take a while to recoup the multi-thousand dollar price premium you pay for installing a full smart panel or sub-panel. Energy monitors, modular energy managers, smart EV chargers, and smart (or even just programmable) thermostats will likely have shorter payback periods.

Smart panels make sense even with a solar-only system (no battery), because they let you ration your free solar power more effectively. This isn’t wrong, especially when the smart panel can communicate directly with specific high-draw devices like an EV charger—it can put the precise amount of surplus solar power toward charging the car, rather than sending it to the grid, for example. If it’s just a trickle of extra solar power, that’s all the car gets. If there’s a whopping 6 kW of excess juice, then it’ll all go to the EV before it zips off to the grid. But there are other less expensive devices that do the same thing—plenty of smart EV chargers can communicate directly with popular solar inverters, for example. 

Smart panels can help you spot appliance malfunctions before they get really expensive and disruptive. This can be true. For example, a heat pump can leak a lot of refrigerant before it stops working. But with every ounce that evaporates, the heating and cooling efficiency gets worse, and higher energy bills can sneak up on you over time. (Refrigerants aren't cheap to replace either, so the less you lose to leaks, the better—for everyone.) With a smart panel or other energy monitor, you have a better shot at catching the energy use creeping upwards before it becomes a major issue. But again, you don’t need a full smart panel to spot these trends: Energy monitors and managers can see it, and more and more appliances come with built-in systems to spot these issues.

For the equipment alone, expect to pay a price premium of at least $1,000 over a traditional breaker box or sub-panel, and possibly more. At the time of writing in early 2024, here’s what to expect:

• The Lumin sub-panel costs between $2,500 and $3,150 just for the equipment, whereas a traditional sub-panel is about $100 for the box and another $200 for the circuit breakers at most. The labor costs for both should be similar.

• The Span costs $3,500, while a “regular” full-size box is around $400 (both before labor). They’ll both need to be filled with a few hundred dollars’ worth of standard circuit breakers, too. 

• Every Savant module costs $120 before labor (or $240, for the 50-amp version), and covers just one or two circuits at a time. To really unlock all the benefits of smart energy management, you’ll probably want to cover at least a dozen circuits (the same as the Lumin sub-panel).  Depending on how it gets set up, that’s a minimum of $1,200 - $1,500 just for the modules themselves, without getting into any trickle-down costs.

• A Leviton Smart Breaker costs $75 for a standard 20 amp unit, whereas a traditional 20 amp breaker is $7. Smart breakers with higher amperage or GFCI protection have a similarly steep markup over their “dumb” versions.

That’s all before labor, which can cost several thousand dollars for a full panel replacement. Pricey as they are, if you’re deciding between spending $6,500 all-in to install a Span or Schneider Pulse box, vs. a $10,000 service upgrade that involves excavating a sidewalk (plus a 12-month waiting period before the utility can get around to the work), the smart panel seems like a much better deal.

In the context of a solar battery, you might end up saving money in the long run through incremental savings on your energy bill, or through fewer house calls from your electrician, but that’s not guaranteed. 

One upside to note: If you upgrade your panel as part of a battery installation, it would appear that the tax code allows you to claim a 30% tax credit against the cost of the new panel, smart or otherwise—with no limit on the credit. That would certainly help. It’s a bit of a gray area, so check with a tax advisor to confirm.