- I wanna be able to hit golf balls even if the power's out.
This is our dream home.
You guys were here for the process
when we showed everything that we built inside of it.
It is the ultimate smart home.
But recently, I was made aware
of a feature that we don't have in the house.
Our dream home is about to become a lot smarter,
and today's video is sponsored by SPAN.
These are the breaker panels. (door clanking)
If you didn't know,
this has been the way the system has worked
for 100 years. (record scratching)
So first I think it's important
that I explain the problem.
Why on earth are we getting a smart panel in our house?
We have four Teslas.
We have a 7,000-square-foot house.
We live in the desert where it gets to 115 degrees.
We have this Powerwall right here
that we got free from Tesla.
Thank you, Tesla, for sending that for all the referrals.
This is the one that we paid for and put in
because one doesn't make sense.
Two is pretty good.
These two little guys are not going to provide
enough battery power to protect our entire house
if the power went out.
Well, when you get a Tesla Powerwall,
the engineers, the electricians originally go in,
and they hardwire in where that energy
from the Powerwall, say there's a power outage,
where that energy is going to go.
All of the power only goes right here to our studio.
SPAN Smart Panel is going to give me the power
to control my entire house,
the electricity, where it goes, outlets,
which air conditioning, heating units,
the main refrigerator, everything.
I can choose all of that on my phone.
And for me, that is worth spending the money
to install the SPAN panel so that my home is smarter.
I have more control over it.
And if there's an emergency,
I have a bit more peace of mind
that we all don't just have to go sit in the studio
and that's our only option.
But for now, (door clanking)
we gotta cut off the power to the house.
(switches clicking)
We're going dark for the next day.
(switches clicking)
- [Automated] Your service has been
temporarily disconnected. (tone sounding)
- You ever wondered what's inside of your breaker?
We just took the panels off,
which don't try this at home without engineers around you,
which we have 'em.
We've got these experts here. - [Engineer] (indistinct).
- There's no power running to this.
But they pulled off the panel,
and now they're gonna go through one by one,
take these off, make sure that they're labeled properly,
and do a bunch of stuff before we put the new panels on.
But I saw this and thought I've gotta look at it.
Oh my gosh.
Okay, look at this.
We are making progress.
It's a lot of work.
This took a long time to even install
when you're building a house.
If you're somebody that's building a house,
it would be nice to put this in originally
so you don't have to go through the effort
of ripping out the panels. (wires rattling)
But I still think the effort is worth it.
I'm just saying maybe do it while you're building the house
instead of like us two and a half years later.
This is it.
This is the panel that has been in my house
for the last two and a half years.
And then this guy right here is the replacement.
This is the SPAN panel that we are going to be putting in.
There's a lot more that I'm about to learn about this
once we install it and what makes it actually smart.
So the cool thing about being a YouTuber is
that we get to meet really cool people.
Not only are we getting it installed today,
and I told you this video is sponsored by SPAN,
but we have Chad Conway here,
who is the co-founder of SPAN the company.
So, Chad, do you own a Tesla?
- I do.
- [Host] What kind of Tesla do you own?
- I own three Teslas.
- [Host] Three?
- And I have one of the OG Roadsters of course.
- [Host] Yes, (laughing) what number is it?
- 323.
- [Host] Beautiful.
- Yep, and I also own a Model 3 and a Model Y.
- [Host] You were on the Powerwall team at Tesla.
I have two Powerwalls.
So what are some of the benefits
of me having a Tesla Powerwall and having SPAN?
- You can prepare for an outage
and prioritize some of your loads
into the must-have, nice-to-have, and not essential buckets.
And that's really important because during an outage
if you only have two Powerwalls,
they would just discharge almost immediately
as soon as there's an outage.
But with SPAN, you can prioritize
the things that are really important
in best utilizing that battery power.
We've got all the technology built into this backplate,
and the backplate has the ability
to turn each circuit on and off
as well as monitoring it.
So you can see which circuit is using energy
at any point in time.
- [Host] Oh, so this actually has
the technology built into that to shut it down.
It's not just the software.
The software is important, but-
- The software is important,
and the software really enables you to have that control
and actually turn these circuits on and off
from wherever you are in the world.
- This software is so useful for when you have an outage
because as much as I love Tesla and I love their products
there's certain things where they're not perfect,
and they're really not perfect as far as like the app goes
where I can tell it I would like my Tesla Powerwall
to be charged to 100%, down to 20%.
Or I can say only recharge at nighttime
or only run at the nighttime.
But I can't say, guess what,
at my studio, I want the AC running in there.
I want the lights going.
I'd like the electrical panel upstairs
where the internet is.
I want that to be on so that I maintain to have internet.
You can't just choose that
unless you have an electrician come in
and physically hardwire all of these things
running to the Powerwall.
And now it's pretty cool
that now that my house will be set up with SPAN
every single outlet in my house,
as important or as dumb as they may be,
I get to be the one to choose
which ones I want to be running off of the Powerwall.
But there also are a lot of people that are getting SPAN
that don't even have Powerwalls
because it does help you manage
your electricity cost in your house.
I know our pool uses a ton of energy.
We have four electric cars.
That's gonna take a ton of energy.
And then maybe there's something in our house
like some area that we don't know that uses a ton of energy.
Here is where we are at.
We have gotten rid of the dumb panels,
and we now have two of these smart SPAN panels.
First of all, check out how good these things look.
They have this white glass on the outside.
They say SPAN right there.
The entire encasing is just white and beautiful.
And it's one of those things
where typically you hide your breaker
and you put it somewhere where you don't wanna see it.
But right here it looks great.
Open it up, very clean, very organized.
It's pretty fresh.
I need to write down the breaker map on here.
But the funny thing is I almost feel
like I don't need a breaker map right here
because I can look inside of the app on my phone,
and I can see what every one of the breakers does.
But I'll still put it on there, but check it out,
smooth, clean, fresh looking.
And then the other one, (panel clicking)
how nice is this?
They both open up outwards so they don't block each other.
The doors are even smart.
They go the right way so I can have both of the panels open
and you can see inside of them.
There's even lights inside of it.
Like how fresh and clean is that?
A light on that side and a light on that side.
That looks so clean and nice.
Let's see, let's turn off the lights in here.
All the lights are off and, bam, still looks clean.
We're gonna put it to the test right now
and show you and test out some of the things for me
of what the SPAN panel actually does
to make my house smarter.
Now on my phone I have a SPAN app that is connected
to both of the SPAN units, connected to my breakers,
and it's giving me all kinds of information
that I'm going to need to dig into
for the next month or two.
I do have the Tesla app that shows me some of the data.
Like, it shows me this same kind of thing,
where energy's going.
But what SPAN takes it to the next level is
I can look and see right now
what the most popular things are happening
in my house energy-wise.
So I've got a lighting subcontrol panel.
This is like our light panel that controls everything,
a bunch of different lights.
That is running right now the most energy.
We have the air conditioning running
in the master bedroom right now.
I'm not sure why I have the air conditioning running.
I should have the furnace running, but now I know.
Oh, there we go.
I think it just turned off.
Oh no, another furnace is running right now
in the other side of the house,
and it's taking some of the energy.
The refrigerator, 95 watts is going to that right now.
So it's cooling it down.
And I can click on View All Circuits and open it up
and see every circuit that is in our entire house
and see how much power they're drawing on.
And if I see something that looks out of whack
like why is that charging
or why is that running so much energy,
I can go and make some changes based off of it.
I have two different buckets, the yellow and the green.
The green is the must-have circuits.
These are things like the master bedroom,
the golf simulator, the internet modem.
I like to have the internet.
If the power's out, I want the internet.
The pantry ice, I like to be able to have pebble ice.
That's a must-have for me.
I can't imagine it takes too much electricity.
So I'm gonna keep that.
The water heater.
If I take a shower, I'd like to be able to have hot water.
The refrigerator, let's keep our food cold.
So those are in the must-have.
These Powerwalls would provide the must-haves 13 hours
and six minutes of usage.
That could go all night long,
13 hours of the power being out.
Now there's the second bucket, which is the nice-to-haves.
And these are things that I'm like,
"Yeah, these are good to have," and they will run.
Basically, you think of them as green
until these Powerwalls get down to 50%.
Once these get to 50%, only the must-haves work.
So it's going to switch over to the green one,
and only those ones are gonna run.
So here we go.
The power is out, and check it out in the app.
It's red all around, danger zone.
But the good news is it says, "Power outage,
you have 19 hours and seven minutes of backup."
We have power in the places that I want there to be power.
Right now in my garage, like look over here.
There's lights, we have lights in here,
but the power is out.
I have the golf simulator on there.
I wanna be able to hit golf balls even if the power's out.
Say, you know what?
Leslie wants to use the blow dryer
in the bathroom in the master GFI.
She wants to use those outlets.
I just push a button, and it moves it over.
That's really good to see this so that I can be smart
with the energy usage in my house.
There is so much more that I'm learning about this app
as I'm using it.
And what I'm going to be doing
for the next 30 days is just be digging into the data,
seeing how I can optimize the energy usage in my house.
And I'm also really curious
about many, many different things.
Like, I am curious how much of our energy usage per month
comes solely from charging our four electric cars.
Is it 10%?
Is it 40%?
I really don't know,
but I'm gonna have the raw data in here pretty soon,
which is kind of cool 'cause when I sell my house someday
I can show somebody the energy bill and say,
"Hey, if you don't have an electric car,
your energy bill will be 40% less than this or 10%.
I'm not quite sure."
But there's a lot of data that I can find,
and now my house is a lot smarter.
So stay tuned for an update at some point.
And if you would have questions,
let me know in the comments below
because I'm learning myself how this works.
What do you think about the SPAN panels inside of the house?
Follow What's Inside on Twitter.
I'm gonna post on there after 30 days
what percentage of our home usage comes just
from charging our electric cars.
Is it something that you would switch to?
And also what is something that you liked about it?
Seriously, let me know in the comments.
I wanna read that.
And the third thing,
if you want to upgrade your panels to be something smart
and not something that's been basically the same
for 100 years, you can check out the link in the description
and learn everything you need to know about SPAN.
Thank you to SPAN for sponsoring this video
and putting the SPAN panels in our house.
And then, yeah, I'm gonna say something
that I don't think anybody's ever said.
Bring on the power outage.
I want to see what happens in my house
when the power goes out
because I am prepared for an emergency power outage.
Just, I mean, not for like an extended amount of time,
like no, like, hurricanes or earthquakes.
But simple power outage for a day or two,
I think I can handle it now.
(dramatic music)
He was one of the first ever interns
at Tesla back in the day.
He tried to become an intern at Tesla in 2005
when he was 15 years old.
He was asking JB via email,
"Hey, can I get a job here," and emailing them.
And then finally four or five years later, he got his call.
- I was the fifth person on the energy team.
So we started out as a really small outfit,
basically taking some of the Model S modules
and building into residential and commercial battery packs.
And then from there we were able to build
the product that you have,
which is the Powerwall 2.
Right now, to be fully transparent, it's November,
and I think it's way too early to put this stuff up yet.
It's not even Thanksgiving, and this tree is up. (laughing)
But maybe that's just me.