Smart Tech in Your Home
Smart technology can be found everywhere in our homes today. Lights, thermostats, even our kitchen appliances are self-monitoring and keep us informed. With all this advancement, why hasn’t the power command center of our homes improved? The electrical panel has remained virtually unchanged for over 80 years. In 1882, Edison began to illuminate parts of New York City, starting with only 59 customers. It would take almost 50 years until 70% of the homes in the United States were using electric power.
Widespread electricity led to new innovations beyond lighting, modernizing the American home overnight. With advancements also came new dangers like electrocution and fires. That’s when the electrical panel entered our homes. Electric panels not only protected individuals’ homes from these new hazards, but also connected them to the grid, which served and supplied them all power. Almost a century later and these boxes have hardly changed. Yet, the usage and adoption of electric power devices has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our lives, and this is only the beginning.
Old School Breakers
Over the next 20 years, as people buy electric cars and old natural gas furnaces are replaced by electric heat pumps, the total amount of electricity going through the average home is going to quadruple. Our old school breaker panels simply can’t keep up. We live in a world where our smart fridges can tell us if we’re out of oat milk, but our breaker panels can’t automatically stop themselves from tripping. Our breaker panels are in urgent need of an upgrade.
As investors in technology, we were excited to discover Span’s product because it modernizes the standard electrical panel, and empowers owners to adopt better energy practices. The modern panel takes cues from the traditional design with manual switches. But it also includes an advanced technological component that monitors energy usage throughout the home, and allows the panel to smartly balance power draws dynamically across the home. Span’s insights allows homeowners to target areas of their home that are unnecessarily draining energy and adjust them accordingly, or to automatically adjust devices that are competing for constrained electrical power so that you don’t trip a breaker.
Future-Proof Your Home
Further, with solar installations on the rise, the Span panel allows homeowners to avoid the extra clunky equipment, streamline the installation process, and significantly decrease the cost of installation. In essence, the Span panel future-proof our homes, whilst making them more efficient. With innovation all around us, why wouldn’t we upgrade the single most important piece of electrical infrastructure in our homes.
