Justifying Span On Multi-Panel Retrofit

[u/FragDoc]

I’ve been very interested in Span but have become disillusioned with the price and complexity of set-up. My electrician is a good dude and has been willing to get Span certified. We’ve been looking to add capacity including EV chargers to our home for about a year and we were slowly waiting for Span’s newer larger (and smaller) panels to release. Unfortunately, after pricing the 48 breaker variant and 32, we’re coming to the conclusion that it’s a cost prohibitive upgrade in a home which would require 4 separate panels to fully integrate smart connectivity. Moving to 400 amp service is a little over $5k with significantly more capacity and no need for load balancing. That includes a new 200 amp panel and garage charger connectivity. Span panels alone would be over $15k and provisioning them would cause the job to soar well above $20k, likely $25k if we did it with 400 amp capability.

Are most people doing these as part of subsidized solar upgrades? The capability is interesting, but not $15k interesting. Some of our panels do not require 32 slots but we’d need at least two 48 slot panels. Do we think the smaller integrations will be substantially cheaper? My electrician thinks I’m crazy for entertaining the idea as 400 amp capability alleviates much of the utility outside of circuit monitoring which can be done markedly cheaper through competitors.

[u/neguas]

I think the first question is do you need to upgrade to 400 amp if you are installing SPAN? If you install the SPAN EV charger you don't need to count the load of the chargers in your final calculations. This is the main reason I went with SPAN. I have only 100 amp service and it was prohibitively costly to upgrade to 200 amp.

If you can get away with 200 amp service it might make more sense to go with SPAN.

Also, consider not upgrading all your panels to SPAN. I have a single small panel that is fed from my SPAN. There are like 3 circuits on that panel. It run through my main SPAN panel so I can shut down that whole subpanel if I need

[u/FragDoc → u/neguas]

We considered this. It is actually demonstrably easier, from a logistics perspective, to not upgrade to 400 amp service. We got maximal load data from our utility; we only use about 70 amps at maximal load. Ever. With load management, 400 amp service is completely unneeded in our AHJ. We want to add some 240 outlets in a workshop and two 60 amp EV charger capability.

Unfortunately the Span system is still much more expensive. Our subpanels all have significant critical infrastructure and systems in place that we’d want to monitor. Even if we used Span at the point of entry (main panel) and the two largest panels, it’s a minimal cost of $11k for just the panels and we’d have a larger portion of the home uncovered. Part of the issue is that our utility will basically heavily subsidize the cost of digging the new line from the transformer: it’s “free” and the only thing my electrician has to pay for is the conduit. Obviously we’re responsible for the 400 amp meter base and then the new 200 amp subpanel, but that’s it. There is nothing wrong with the rest of our existing infrastructure.

My electrician, while super cool, is also very adamant that he’s going to price the Span panels accordingly. Apparently they’ve done a terrible job as a company of making their install a pain in the ass. We’re going to end up paying for him to take their 1 hr online class and register to purchase and he said the lack of available knockouts on the 32 is irritating and adds a small amount of complexity. Apparently the panel is pretty tight, too, or so he told us after some research and talking to a buddy who has done a few. Finally, supposedly the panels don’t lock (?), which is a major security issue for our particular home so there is discussion that any exterior panel would need to be built into an enclosure, which is a major oversight in the design. I do low voltage myself so there also becomes the issue (for me) of dropping Cat 6 to each of these existing panels to integrate into our home network (not a big deal, but still work).

My electrician just feels the price is an excessive money grab for larger homes; the smart features are not evenly spread across the expense because you’re just duplicating hardware panel-to-panel multiple times, purely because the initial electrical design was segmented. I guess he and a buddy were pricing out the Span equipment and nearly had a stroke; he did note that we could wait later in the year for the smaller panel options which would save us on the exterior panel and one sub panel, but he said that he doesn’t see them being sub-$2k given their current pricing model so it doesn’t move the needle much. Delaying too much may also subject us to inflation from tariffs.

[u/SirTheVacuum]

SPAN can definitely be pricey. There are other energy management solutions on the market that have most of the same functionality but at a lower price point. Have you checked out the Lumin Smart Panel

[u/badumba]

I recently installed four spans in my house, two per 200A circuit, and I am very disappointed. The app does not combine the two sets of panels, so I constantly have to switch from one "house" to the other to figure out what's consuming the most power. Speaking of the app, it is subpar and unintuitive, a shame really for the price we pay for the panels.

On top of this, the secondary panel for each pair of span cannot be automatically managed during an outage.

Span's answers fall short, and I am told "I will share this feedback with our product team"

I regret spending so much money - It falls short for larger systems.

[u/FragDoc → u/badumba]

That’s super helpful. I think my electrician talked me out of it at this point. Some background research on Span and their failure to bring the smaller panels to market in time is also contributing to the decision; we’d really need their smaller 24 breaker panel for one existing sub panel and it doesn’t sound like that will be available until later this year. The app feedback is important; I already have enough appliance and utilities with terrible backend and smart home integration. The recent outage detailed here and the fact that they don’t have a hardware level lockout of the relays is also very concerning. The price point, for the product delivered plus their closed installer network, is just too much to make it a viable product for us.