dude so i have in front of me the craziest
electrical panel i've ever seen so uh schneider electric sent this to me it's a square d panel
but what's cool about is it's like a multi-use panel so it's a meter enclosure it's a load center
and it has hookups for alternative power sources so if you have solar if you have
generators things like that you can actually hook up it's all in one box so we're doing an unboxing
so most of the time when you have an electrical panel out on the outside of your house right your
electrical service comes out there most of the time you're going to have a meter enclosure
meaning an entire enclosure just for this meter to stab into separate then you're going to have maybe
a main disconnect which might be another enclosure with one huge breaker in it you could have another
electrical panel out there if it's not like a main breaker kind of panel or you might have multiple
different panels out on your service and then once you start getting complexity in the system and you
start adding solar you can have all of this solar stuff all over the wall people are starting to do
backup battery power ups power or generators so they've got like an automatic transfer switch or
a manual transfer switch it just gets to be where the service is like taking up like 20 feet of wall
this thing is a 200 amp energy center by square d this is specifically for new construction so this
is not a remodel box and that's something that they're developing right now so they do have plans
to to put something together that's maybe meant for interior applications or remodel applications
but this is more for new construction out on the outside of a house so let's break into it
you can see first we have a utility meter obviously in the same enclosure but there is
separation so you can open up this little cavity and you can see down you know this is where your
surface entrance conductors are going to come into the meter you can see there's definitely
separation there and they give you holes all the way up to three inch which is really nice
so you don't have to try to you know pop in bigger holes than you normally would
this is 200 amp rated by the way so it's 200 amp single phase specifically not for three phase
i like these little like knob things that they have this is really secure so it's not i mean i
think this thing's heavy duty like really really well constructed all of square d stuff is really
well constructed i think square g is the best out on the market i pretty much exclusively use them
except for if there's like budgetary constraints or something like that but they even have the
home line system so they have like a little bit more price conscious version of their stuff if
people don't want to go with qo but anyways all qo stuff is really well engineered so i like these
little knob things if they just feel really secure and you don't have to like have a screwdriver to
try to open something and close something i just really like that check this out dude so they have
what i really like is they have this main that is separate from the actual load center itself
um and because it's alternative power sources they give you a few different options so you notice
there's a two section panel so this is the top section right down here you have an ability to
control a the top section with a main and then you get another 110 amp main for the bottom section
if you look at the numbers here you can see they actually give you 60 spaces
so a lot of other panels out there a lot of you know ql panels they'll have like a 40 space panel
or a 42 space panel on their 225 amp panels um 30 space stuff like that so that's what's cool about
it is that it gives you a ton more space but it also breaks it up into an upper and lower it comes
with a surge protector already so i think that's awesome it has a whole house surge protector those
are the same surge protectors that i use pretty exclusively i'll show you once i open this all up
in a second there's no actual wires to it this thing just snaps in place
down here you have a service receptacle so they give you a wrtr 20 amp receptacle so
if you need to plug in power or anything like that you can do that down here they also give
you a knockout so you can put a receptacle in here if you have a portable generator and you
want to hook like a manual transfer switch or an automatic transfer switch up to this
you can do all of that so let's open it up kind of see what the guts look like inside
that's section one that's section two
that's the main breaker
this is the solar cts
this is a wiser energy monitor that actually comes with this if you guys are not familiar i
actually have another video where i installed one of these at my house it's really cool it allows
your entire electrical system to be seen on an app so you can see what your energy usage is
you can see what are the prime loads that are running throughout the day you can see when
certain loads turn on turn off and then there's some connected wiring devices that i also did
a video on recently that are schneider electric connected wiring devices so each specific device
can be seen on this uh on this app versus you just seeing entire loads as before it was just entire
loads but now they actually have specific devices that you can coordinate with this through wi-fi so
this is really cool that it comes with that as well so it's just monitoring
it's kind of like stepping everything up it's monitoring it's adding alternative energy sources
to it it's putting everything into one enclosure this box right here these are the donuts so you
actually hook these donuts up there's a set of solar donuts if you're hooking up with solar power
and then there's regular donuts that you would hook up to the feeders if you're trying to monitor
um your incoming power but all of this stuff just hooks up right into this wiser energy monitor
and then you take it to your wi-fi and boom you have your entire electrical system on your phone
you can see in real time what it's doing all right so then let's look at some of the breakers so this
is a plug on neutral system so you can tell this is a 225 amp rated bus so yes it's the 200 amp
main that main breaker is 200 amps but we have 210 amp breakers giving you a total of 225 amp bus
but what's cool is everything's plug on neutral now so schneider has kind of moved
into a plug on neutral style so all of your arc fault breakers you don't have any of these crazy
pigtails that you gotta like straighten out and run all these crazy wires uh the neutrals are
already hooked up you can see that they're connected this is our neutral bus up here
and they're connected to these down here so even like um surge protector this is making
contact with neutral so you don't actually have you it's you know it's wired into the two
uh l1 and l2 you're too hot but it also makes contact with neutral so you don't need any wires
everything is run full circuit through the surge protector they of course have all of their grounds
bonded to the neutral so that is one thing because this is a service rated enclosure and this is at
the service where the first main disconnecting or the first means of disconnection are by
code you're supposed to bond your neutrals and your grounds at this point so it already comes
bonded they have a conductor dependent bond so they run these huge conductors in between
each one of these just to make sure that you're they're not using the enclosure as the way for
fault current uh to travel in a fault setting but they they actually run a conductor to ensure that
bond between everything so i really like that so as you can see this is really a great setup for
if you have any alternative energy needs so basically if you have utility power you can have
utility power come into this if you have solar you can bring solar into this you could maybe have all
of your solar loads come into one thing you've got the solar kits on here if you also have a backup
generator or you have backup batteries like a ups system you could do the same thing a lot of times
what we do is when we install panels in the house i'll have like all of our power for like um main
things that i would want backed up on a generator being fed from a transfer switch
and then right next to it i'll have utility power that feeds like other loads that are you know not
as essential so i'll keep some things running out of the generator specifically through the
transfer switch they're still running on utility power but if the transfer switch kicks over and
that generator needs to kick over to one panel all of my essential loads are running one panel so the
cool thing is that it kind of mimics that setup here where you can have one panel that's maybe
non-essential loads one thing that is essential loads one thing that's backed up one thing that's
specifically utility there's a whole bunch of different ways in which you can do this but
i think all in all this is probably the coolest panel that i've ever seen um the only thing about
it that's kind of a bummer is just how heavy it is like seriously i think this takes like four
dudes to lift um but when you take into consideration how many enclosures you have
on the wall to be able to do the same kind of setup where everything is separate you could be
talking like four to six different enclosures and all these different things that you're gonna have
to spend a whole day out there building multiple enclosures so i think price wise it's probably
more price conscious to be able to do everything in one um and it's gonna
save you time because you only have one thing to install rather than all of these separate little
features so go out and get you one like i said they're gonna have a remodel version of this
that's coming in this is the new construction model oh we didn't talk about the bottoms
so check out the knockouts one thing before we go um they give you a whole bunch of different
options so you know you've got half inch three quarter uh one inch you've got up to an inch
and a quarter inch and a half to get into the main enclosure up to three to get into the utility side
and then on the top you've got a whole bunch of different options um but pretty much half inch
and three quarters because you're going to be running branch circuits most of the time into
this but if you do have a large feeder they do give you up to an inch and a half coal
so that's pretty cool so all along this is your schneider energy center qo square d
energy center what do you think and like i said before if you want to check out the wiser energy
monitor click here if you want to check out the connected wiring devices that all sync
up with all of this stuff through the app click on this video here 11 crazy people i'll see you