Geothermal - Update on Electrical and the Emporia Energy Monitor

We finally heard back from our electric utility about upgrading our grid-tie connection. Months ago, they assured me it would be around $1,000, with a 4 week lead time.

They now want $8,000, with no firm time frame.

And that's not counting roughly $6,000 our electrician estimated for a new meter and upgraded electrical panel.

...

I'm not f---ing doing it.

I've been going over the form the National Electric Code issues for load-sizing a house. You do get some derates by assuming you don't actually have every single light on in the house at the same time, but even that assumes you have inefficient incandescent bulbs (we're fully LED now) and also assumes you have everything else on at once: the electric oven, the heat pump, the backup electric resistive heater, the car chargers we threw in there when we were thinking we would have 400 amps of capacity to play with...

It turns out, as long as we don't run the electric resistive heat and the oven at the same time, we fit in our 150 amp budget. Or if we turn off the car chargers (which we don't even have yet), we can run the oven and the resistive heat together. If any one of those three things doesn't run, we can have everything else in the house sucking down as much power as possible, and still fit in the 150 amp budget. 

Why don't they tell people that kind of thing? We could have had the heat pump electrical done on the same day as the rest of the install if we had known that.

Ugh.

So how do I automate this so I don't accidentally trip my main circuit breaker in the future, when we have fully electrified the house and have two electric cars?

There's a company selling a "smart" circuit breaker panel called Span, which seems to be exactly what I want. It can turn loads on and off at the circuit breaker level to keep the total load under a set threshold. I sent them a request for quote, but haven't heard anything back in 8 weeks now.

In the mean time, I've been using an Emporia Vue energy meter for about a year now. It clamps on to the main cables from the grid and up to16 individual circuits inside the panel, reporting through wifi to a smartphone app.

And Emporia has come out with an EV charger that can adjust to keep peak load below a set threshold, and they're saying they are working on individual smart circuit breakers, thermostats, and "smart appliances" (which I hope means electric water heaters).

If Emporia is for real, I might be able to completely solve this problem for a few hundred dollars, rather than fourteen thousand dollars.

In the meantime, we are now on the electrian's schedule to get final wiring in place, followed by final inspection by the city. Hopefully we'll have this project buttoned up soon.