A smart electrical panel and smart breakers give you something a conventional panel never can: real-time insight into what every circuit in your home is doing, remote control over individual breakers, and automated load management that protects your home and reduces energy waste. If you’re replacing an aging panel anyway, upgrading to a smart panel at the same time adds meaningful capability for a fraction of the standalone installation cost. If your home has an EV, solar, or battery storage, a smart panel pays for itself in optimized energy use.

What a Smart Panel Actually Does

Smart panels — such as the Span Panel, Leviton Load Center, or similar systems — replace your main panel and monitor every circuit individually through embedded current sensors. The data is accessible through a smartphone app that shows you, in real time, exactly how much power each circuit is drawing. You can name circuits, set alerts for unusual activity, and view historical usage patterns. For a homeowner trying to understand a high electric bill or identify a device that’s running unnecessarily, this data is immediately actionable.

Remote Breaker Control

Smart breakers can be turned on or off remotely through the app. Practical uses include:

  • Turning off circuits when you’re traveling to reduce standby load
  • Restoring a tripped breaker remotely after confirming the cause is resolved
  • Scheduling circuits to turn off at night automatically (outdoor lights, garage circuits)
  • Checking whether a specific circuit is drawing power unexpectedly
  • Managing access to circuits in a rental unit or vacation property

Load Management for EVs and Solar

This is where smart panels deliver their clearest financial return. A home with both an EV charger and a solar array can instruct the panel to charge the car preferentially when solar production is high, throttle charging automatically when the home’s total load approaches the service limit, and shift other large loads (water heater, dryer) to solar production windows. Without smart panel integration, achieving this level of coordination requires separate load management devices and more complex wiring. The panel itself becomes the intelligence layer.

Colorado’s net metering policy and Xcel Energy’s time-of-use rates make this kind of optimization genuinely valuable — not just an interesting feature. Shifting loads to solar production hours or off-peak utility rate windows has a measurable dollar impact on your monthly bill.

Safety and Alert Features

Smart panels can detect abnormal current signatures — patterns that might indicate an arc fault, a failing appliance, or a circuit approaching its limit — and send alerts before a problem becomes a fire or an appliance failure. For older Denver homes where the wiring may have decades of wear, this kind of continuous monitoring adds a layer of safety that a conventional panel simply cannot provide.

When a Smart Panel Makes the Most Sense

Smart panels are the right choice when you’re replacing a panel that’s at end of life, when you’re adding an EV charger and solar in the same project, or when you have a backup power system (generator or battery) and want intelligent load prioritization during outages. If your current panel is working fine and you don’t have any of these additional systems, the ROI calculation is less clear — a whole-home energy monitor (a device that clips onto your panel leads without replacing it) may provide much of the monitoring benefit at a lower cost. Done’s electricians can help you evaluate which approach fits your goals.

To discuss smart panel installation for your home, start with Done’s panel and wiring services. For EV charger integration, see our EV charging page. For backup power coordination with a smart panel, explore Done’s backup power options.