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I do love learning new things!
But wow, there’s been a lot this week.
Highlights from today: smart panels / smart load centers. I’ve been going on a lot about the electrical service and how big I think it should be and how big the engineer says the code says it has to be (he’s wrong; that’s what all that 220.70 stuff was about). Having established that I’m right and the engineer was wrong, I’m now stuck with the fact that my entire team has refused in various ways to engage with actually solving the problem of how to get the electrical load calculation and what the utility is willing to provide to match.
Because it’s a nice tight house, and because we have all the fancy heat pump, ventless dryer and so forth, we really don’t expect this thing to use that much electricity; the issue is the old fashioned way of calculating load (adding it all up) vs. the reality (that’s insane, expensive and large services are honestly quite dangerous — this doesn’t make anything safer, and if you are never going to need most of the service it is wasteful in many different ways). But in addition to doing all the energy efficiency stuff, you can also make some choices about what stuff you run and when you run it. If you have two EVs, you can charge them one at a time, or slower, or whatever. We have the ventless washer-dryer planned, so scheduling drying laundry isn’t really a winner for us, but there might well be other things we could schedule to make sure things don’t happen all at once.
Smart panels / smart load centers are one approach. If you think about your electrical panel, you probably think about those breakers as things that flip when you overload a circuit. But you can also think of it as, “Let’s turn this off so we don’t create an overload at the panel / house level.” If you have a generator, and it’s not a whole house generator, you can either set up a subpanel of Things Needed when the generator is running, or you can just open your panel and turn off all the Not Needed. Same same, just a bit more work, but if you don’t have a failover whole house generator, generators are a lot of work anyway.
This is the first one I found:
https://www.span.io/
But there are others:
https://www.leviton.com/en/products/residential/load-centers/the-leviton-smart-load-center
https://www.luminsmart.com/
https://www.savant.com/
I wrote a draft of what I want at a high level (the panels, batteries and generator integrated with smart panels) and included possible equipment suppliers (see above, but also two local installers, one of which produced the PV only proposal). I really hope this is enough to get someone to run with it. If this system had been in the drawings, the engineer probably would have learned that whatever software he has to do his job includes a way to do the load calculation correctly, and we could have avoided this argument in the first place.
One of the really nice things about the smart panels is that it makes the backup power solution so much more elegant. The kind of microgrid based system I want will detect when grid power is off, shed load to protect batteries, and bring load back on when the grid comes back up / the generator powers on. Best of all, you can set your own priorities on what gets shed and in what order — and you can also schedule when stuff runs and so forth. I still have some questions about HVAC startup load sequencing, but between the proposed building management system, and the power system (integrating solar, battery, generator, microgrid and smart panels) I am asking for, I think we can probably do everything we want to do and fit it within a reasonable service size.
If someone on the team had known to offer me this (I didn’t have to tell the HVAC guy what to do, but our HVAC guy is amazing), I would have learned a lot less. On balance, that probably would have been better, but I will take this as a consolation prize.
ETA:
After I did all that, I found this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/smart-panels-home-improvement-energy-9544da4a
I found it at the Sage Energy website, which is mentioned in the WSJ piece. *sigh* Everything about this search process has been backwards. People kept telling me about youtube videos they’d seen depicting this type of system and equipment but could never manage to get me a link. It took forever to even get appropriate words and phrases to search on. Once you are in the right general area, it is trivial to find tons of coverage and websites and so forth, but even getting in the vicinity has been _hard_.
ETAYA:
Oh, and I did get to talk to the architect about showers, but he unfortunately had to listen to some ranting about all this power system stuff first. I mean, it is his job, and also. I feel sorry for all of us. The team is having a moment, for sure.
But wow, there’s been a lot this week.
Highlights from today: smart panels / smart load centers. I’ve been going on a lot about the electrical service and how big I think it should be and how big the engineer says the code says it has to be (he’s wrong; that’s what all that 220.70 stuff was about). Having established that I’m right and the engineer was wrong, I’m now stuck with the fact that my entire team has refused in various ways to engage with actually solving the problem of how to get the electrical load calculation and what the utility is willing to provide to match.
Because it’s a nice tight house, and because we have all the fancy heat pump, ventless dryer and so forth, we really don’t expect this thing to use that much electricity; the issue is the old fashioned way of calculating load (adding it all up) vs. the reality (that’s insane, expensive and large services are honestly quite dangerous — this doesn’t make anything safer, and if you are never going to need most of the service it is wasteful in many different ways). But in addition to doing all the energy efficiency stuff, you can also make some choices about what stuff you run and when you run it. If you have two EVs, you can charge them one at a time, or slower, or whatever. We have the ventless washer-dryer planned, so scheduling drying laundry isn’t really a winner for us, but there might well be other things we could schedule to make sure things don’t happen all at once.
Smart panels / smart load centers are one approach. If you think about your electrical panel, you probably think about those breakers as things that flip when you overload a circuit. But you can also think of it as, “Let’s turn this off so we don’t create an overload at the panel / house level.” If you have a generator, and it’s not a whole house generator, you can either set up a subpanel of Things Needed when the generator is running, or you can just open your panel and turn off all the Not Needed. Same same, just a bit more work, but if you don’t have a failover whole house generator, generators are a lot of work anyway.
This is the first one I found:
https://www.span.io/
But there are others:
https://www.leviton.com/en/products/residential/load-centers/the-leviton-smart-load-center
https://www.luminsmart.com/
https://www.savant.com/
I wrote a draft of what I want at a high level (the panels, batteries and generator integrated with smart panels) and included possible equipment suppliers (see above, but also two local installers, one of which produced the PV only proposal). I really hope this is enough to get someone to run with it. If this system had been in the drawings, the engineer probably would have learned that whatever software he has to do his job includes a way to do the load calculation correctly, and we could have avoided this argument in the first place.
One of the really nice things about the smart panels is that it makes the backup power solution so much more elegant. The kind of microgrid based system I want will detect when grid power is off, shed load to protect batteries, and bring load back on when the grid comes back up / the generator powers on. Best of all, you can set your own priorities on what gets shed and in what order — and you can also schedule when stuff runs and so forth. I still have some questions about HVAC startup load sequencing, but between the proposed building management system, and the power system (integrating solar, battery, generator, microgrid and smart panels) I am asking for, I think we can probably do everything we want to do and fit it within a reasonable service size.
If someone on the team had known to offer me this (I didn’t have to tell the HVAC guy what to do, but our HVAC guy is amazing), I would have learned a lot less. On balance, that probably would have been better, but I will take this as a consolation prize.
ETA:
After I did all that, I found this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/smart-panels-home-improvement-energy-9544da4a
I found it at the Sage Energy website, which is mentioned in the WSJ piece. *sigh* Everything about this search process has been backwards. People kept telling me about youtube videos they’d seen depicting this type of system and equipment but could never manage to get me a link. It took forever to even get appropriate words and phrases to search on. Once you are in the right general area, it is trivial to find tons of coverage and websites and so forth, but even getting in the vicinity has been _hard_.
ETAYA:
Oh, and I did get to talk to the architect about showers, but he unfortunately had to listen to some ranting about all this power system stuff first. I mean, it is his job, and also. I feel sorry for all of us. The team is having a moment, for sure.