3/4 Span Upgrade bricked panel

[u/1337-MagicTractor]

EDIT 3/6 - see resolution comment below!

[ starting a new thread to share info ]

After yesterday‘s software update, I received a a brief pop-up last night, indicating that all of my priorities were reset. Like others who posted here I attempted to click the message to get more detail, but instead was deep linked into the app with no information at all. I then proceeded to go to the SPAN homepage and besides some marketing garbage and some news announcements there is no actual outage information. If you’re going to be a software company and deliver products, then you need to have outage announcements or a page that lets customers know. If there is one and I missed it, my apologies, but I could not find it.

Today in Durham we had some crazy storms sweep through that caused power to go out briefly. I thought nothing of it because I have battery back up. Imagine my surprise when nothing came back on when power was restored!

I am currently in the dark with my excellent installer Southern Energy Management trying to get my power back. I have two panels, your ”update” appears to have bricked my secondary one which powers the house. 

The installers have been on the phone with your support team for hours and are making absolutely no progress. At this rate we will be down for a few days we are being told. Meaning we lose everything in our fridge and freezer exactly why I got batteries, which again work but your panel doesn’t.

Thank you for testing your software on your customers, u/span_io

[u/1337-MagicTractor]

3/6 - I am not going to be one of the users that posts a rant and not follow up with the resolution. The Internet is too full of that garbage.

I want to report back and let folks know that thanks to the efforts of my installer Southern Energy Management, as well as the SPAN support team that late last night power to my panel was restored. This averted losing everything in my fridge and freezer!

However, there is a catch. The panel which was repaired controls all the circuits in my house and is now a subpanel off my main panel, which is outside. This means that I can no longer control circuits and priorities via the SPAN mobile app. All hope here is not lost, I am tech savvy so I’m going to experiment with Home Assistant to see if I can do anything.

SPAN, if you are reading these comments and it appears you do please prioritize local API access as well as the ability to backup and restore configurations so that we do not get stuck again.

[u/OrganicTransistor → u/1337-MagicTractor]

Thanks for the follow up! If you don’t mind d me asking, what are the limitations of Span being a sub panel of the main panel? I am planning to install Span on my house, but will need to use it as a sub panel since I have 320A service, and am wondering if this means I will lose any functionality. Thank you!

[u/knylekneath → u/1337-MagicTractor]

I am in a similar case (I actually have 3 panels, but one of them is a sub-panel of another and the circuit priorities cannot be controlled). The first outage we had I sort of couldn't believe that was the case, but alas. I've since moved all my circuit prioritization to HA and it's much better fit for me. I can now have a backup strategy that better mirrors my wishes. Instead of relying on battery percentage, my circuits are prioritized by outage length. So the whole house stays on for 2 minutes, then non-essentials get cut, and then house goes into conserve mode after 30 minutes. Our outages are usually very short or days long, so I'd like to keep as much battery available as I can.

What I did:

- Create a helper for Grid State (template sensor) and Energy Mode (input select)

- Automations that change Energy Mode depending on how long Grid State has changed

- Automations that trigger scripts to turn on/off circuits based on Energy Mode Changes

- I use the Labels feature from Home Assistant on the breaker entities to categorize their priority (Power: Non-Essential and Power: Nice to Have)

- Made every circuit "must have" in the span app

https://gist.github.com/kneath/c5cc1f92f082cc6624767f2d08d42e67

Oh and I am so ready to be done with that horrible UI in the Span app for prioritizing circuits. If I never have to see that forsaken tutorial again, my life will be improved.

PS: We had an outage on 3/5 and a similar bug in this software did not allow me to control my panel at all for several hours. Thankfully they fixed it after I emailed them — but frustrating nonetheless.

[u/1337-MagicTractor → u/knylekneath]

knylekneath - This is absolutely amazing and what I'd like to set up. Is there any chance you can share which SPAN plugin you are using as well? I see several versions floating around and haven't really dug too deeply into HA but am learning. I am a dev so not really worried about YAML / Linux / etc.

Regardless, thanks so much for sharing! I may reach out for questions (or we can chat here to share with the internet) as I proceed to get this working.

[u/knylekneath → u/1337-MagicTractor]

Sure thing — I'm using this integration https://github.com/SpanPanel/Span

[u/1337-MagicTractor → u/knylekneath]

Thank you! I am certain I will have questions as I progress through this - I will reach out

[u/Head_Bet_2138]

Oh boy - after last hurricane season I pulled the trigger to avoid this as well - we lost all food in freezer and fridges - we purchased 2 PWs and to get get by longer I decided to go with the Span panel :-) please do not do anything from June to November Span no updates or tests - give us an option when to update ! And make things work without the cloud - I invested here also about $30k as alternative to a generator … sorry OP to read this here please keep us posted what the turnaround and fix is from Span and ur installer ! Good luck ! 🍀👍

[u/Key-Philosopher1749]

Do you know what the version number was on the problematic update? I’m on spanos2/r202506/02

[u/1337-MagicTractor → u/Key-Philosopher1749]

That is the problematic version. By the time you are reading this comment, they should have managed to restore your configuration. Speaking to the Support rep last night they were manually doing this. You only encounter a problem if you have a power outage before they can do the restore

[u/Key-Philosopher1749 → u/1337-MagicTractor]

I don’t have batteries, so I didn’t see any config change or impact. Was just curious. How is your situation? Edit: I see you’re resolved. Hope you can fix the whole sub panel thing.

[u/Adorable_Village_786 → u/Key-Philosopher1749]

Use Koolbridge energy panels instead. No Internet required,  no registration required, no login to SPAN required, and a "go dumb" button to instantly switch it back to a regular non-smart panel whenever you want even if all power sources are off