Hippy SteveLooking for #Electrical advice/recommendations for our #OffGrid #Solar setup.
We have a Homeline Load Center panel in our bathhouse. The electric water heater is on a 2-pole breaker for 240V/50A total. I believe these use Schneider square D standard breakers.
We need to have the water heater be a wi-fi app controlled device, ideally. We've been manually turning the water heater on and off for years. This leads to mistakes like last night, when we forgot to kill the breaker before sunset, and someone took a bath, resulting in the water heater kicking on and crashing the solar system after about 40 minutes. It causes a camp-wide blackout from low battery voltage disconnect. Then we had to run the generator for an hour to get the batteries back up to enough charge to last the rest of the night.
From what I understand, schneider doesn't make wifi breakers. But they do make wifi relays that plug in like a breaker into the panel. then there's an energy monitor that goes in the panel to provide the wifi control. So the breaker output goes to the relay, and the relay output powers the heater.
So... Do we
a. go with the schneider smart relays in the existing panel
b. just wire an external timer between the existing breaker and water heater.
c. ditch the homeline panel and get something like the leviton that allows for wifi enabled breakers.
note: we do not want cloud connectivity. just old fashioned local wifi control.
Real-Time Disaster Earth Alert
JM Horner 🤠
Alejandro Sepúlveda T.
