Graceful load shedding – constructive criticism

Smart Load ports are great. I’m also a big fan of smart panels like the SPAN, but when it comes to load shedding, they’re not perfect.  I present to you three such instances, and some proposals to move forward.

Example 1: I have a deep water well pump 760ft into the ground that sends water another 100 ft up a hill to a storage tank. The well pump is managed and protected from dry-run by a pump controller, all on a 50A circuit.  The system is great at pulling decent current for long durations, but there’s one thing you’re not supposed to do with it…  shut off the breaker while it’s running. Doing so can cause damage, and some pump controllers will show an error code and not start again until the error is acknowledged by pressing a button on the controller.  It would be safer to stop a running pump by intercepting the tank float sensor circuit with a relay that could then be controlled (maybe wirelessly?) by the load management system.  A general-purpose relay that’s configurable like a Smart Load port would be really helpful.

Example 2: Smart Wifi-connected heat pump water heaters lose their smarts when turned off at the breaker.  Rheem has EcoNet, and I’m sure other appliance manufacturers have their own network-connected protocols.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could connect your EcoNet account to EG4 so the EG4 load management controller could reach out over the network to turn down the set temperature or even turn it up when there’s too much energy coming in?

Example 3: Folks with a Tesla vehicle and Tesla Powerwall enjoy the ability to set limits on their vehicle charging when grid power goes down to protect the batteries from being depleted.  The Tesla Backup Gateway communicates over a network and stops charging without ripping the power away from the vehicle.  Who doesn’t love getting woken up by a “Charging stopped at 2:45am with battery at 65%” message on their phone because the Smart Load port hits a threshold?  Tesla has an API that controls charging over the internet, seams like an easy win to include that integration in a future EG4 firmware update.  Even better, anyone using a Tesla v3 wall connector (WiFi-enabled) can use “Dynamic Power Management” to prevent overloading an inverter when being used by other household loads or when charging multiple vehicles simultaneously.  Either Wired with CT’s or wirelessly with a Neurio power meter in your panel. EG4 could mimic that device and go beyond with battery / solar integration without the hardware device.

The aforementioned solutions to all three of these problems don’t burn up any Smart Load ports, provide more elegant load shedding, and could add functionality and value to existing EG4 hardware already in service.

Thank you for making such great products, I look forward to seeing them be even better!