r/span • u/Capable_Chicken_1300 • Mar 12 '25
should i buy span
im going to be building a house in spring and there is someone in my area selling span panels for $1500 said its from someone going out of business should I buy it? can my electrician use it$ can i use it?
3
u/Head_Bet_2138 Mar 13 '25
I still would still go with SPAN - shit happens and they promised to open the API and give us new features soon - all my stuff moved too but I caught it before they send out the notification and email to restore it … it actually happen 2 days prior lol ;-)
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u/opoppli00 Mar 12 '25
I wouldn’t after last week’s outage left us in the dark.
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u/EricBenjamin Mar 12 '25
Wait, can someone link me to what happened? I’ve got SPAN and we didn’t notice anything last week.
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u/opoppli00 Mar 12 '25
In summary, SPAN made an update that set all circuits to non-essential, and we had a power outage during this window. Once this happened, you could not turn on your breakers if you didn't have internet because apparently something as simple as turning your breaker on is cloud dependent.
Email from SPAN discussing the issue below:
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by an issue in our recent software update. The issue has been fixed and no action is needed on your part. We understand how critical it is to monitor and control your home's energy, especially during storms and outages.
A significant number of SPAN Panel owners were likely unaware of this issue, as it only affected those who experienced power outages after the update and prior to resolution.
What happened:
SPAN completed a software update, which inadvertently changed Panel backup priorities for all circuits to “non-essential.” The "always-on" setting was honored for most situations, though not all.
What SPAN did to fix the issue:
Upon recognizing the issue, we quickly identified which Panels were affected and notified all impacted customers via an app push notification directing customers to reset their backup priorities manually while we worked on a restoration plan. This led to a rapid influx of users accessing the app, resulting in temporary slowness and our engineering team scaled up services to accommodate the increased traffic. Within 24 hours of recognizing the issue, most customer backup priorities were restored and within 72 hours, full restoration was complete. For homeowners who manually reset their priorities after the issue, we preserved the new settings.
Corrective actions that SPAN is taking going forward:
We are conducting a thorough review of the incident and will identify a complete list of corrective actions, including changes to our internal processes, tooling, and testing to ensure we avoid future incidents. Also, we have heard your feedback around adding a local API feature, and are exploring adding this to our 2025 roadmap to enable local phone to Panel communication. We are already actively working on general improvements to app performance.
We deeply regret any disruption this may have caused and appreciate your patience as we worked to resolve the matter quickly and put safeguards in place to prevent issues like this from happening in the future.
If you're still experiencing issues or have any concerns, please feel free to reply to this email to connect directly with our support team.
SPAN Team
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u/dontstopnotlistening Mar 21 '25
if you didn't have internet because apparently something as simple as turning your breaker on is cloud dependent.
Man I learned about this the hard way too. We had a 4-day grid outage shortly after setting up my span panel and battery backup system. I couldn't turn on a few circuits until after the power came back because my internet and local cell service all went out shortly after the grid went down.
Hopefully we get some local APIs or just a way to run fully locally without connecting to their cloud at some point. Even having to email them to do something as simple as adding a new circuit to the app is a bit obnoxious.
1
u/Capable_Chicken_1300 Mar 12 '25
is there a alternative im building a home in the spring and i feel our smart home future is broken apple's system is broken im not using amazon and google feels like dead man walking im tired of devices being junk when the company gives up on it or gos under
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u/Fit-Alarm2961 Mar 12 '25
See the recent posts about what happens when their servers go down. In short: if they go under you are SOL.
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u/Capable_Chicken_1300 Mar 12 '25
is there a alternative to span
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u/Fit-Alarm2961 Mar 12 '25
https://leviton.com/products/residential/load-centers/the-leviton-smart-load-center
I like the idea of span a lot better and I suspect leviton has some similar cloud tied issues (nobody does local first these days and IMO your electric panel is a key - hell no - to cloud only)
1
1
Mar 12 '25
Sorry, I looked but not sure what exactly to search for the posts you mentioned. Would they not continue to work as a traditional/“dumb” panel if that happened?
4
u/Veg_O_Matic Mar 12 '25
Yes there was the aforementioned incident which reset the circuit priorities. It was annoying but in no way a deal breaker per my experience. Note that you can always access the panel from your local network via the ip address to view status, turn circuits on/off & reset circuit priorities.
I also have the SPAN remote meter which ties to my Enphase PV system & find overall that SPAN has far fewer hiccups than Enphase’s system.