Hello!
I was curious to know how I could swap out my circuit breakers with smart ones, and which ones would work best with Home Assistant? I haven’t the slightest clue how to research circuit breakers so some guidance is very much welcomed! I have attached photos of my breaker to assist anyone who might be able to point me in the right direction! Thank you in advance!
Hi,
To ask for general advice, it would help the community to help you if you gave some basic requirements.
, but assumptions with power engineering kill. 
My suggestion is if you are looking at more than energy monitoring, you need a locally certified Electrical Engineer - but I don’t know a thing about your local laws, and am trying to help safely.
If this helps, 
this post!
Hey @FloatingBoater! Thanks for replying!
Being naiive, I figured it would be as simple as finding a match to the individual breakers currently in my panel and swapping them out.
Hi,
Tuya is not a product range many HA users would recommend. The company developed a cloud-based integration, then seemed to stop maintenance unexpectedly…
Shelly and many other alternatives can operate completely locally, which is a lot more in keeping with privacy, choice, sustainability.
Personally, I would NEVER use a “smart breaker”. Remotely reclosing a circuit that has tripped is fraught with danger, leaving energy monitoring which is much easier to achieve via a clip-on current transformer per circuit. Clipping-on a current sensor is a lot more achievable without engineering training than rewiring.
Here’s a video showing full-home energy monitoring and multiple clip-on current transformers:
I wouldn’t personally use anything Tuya. even just for simple smart switches or plugs. especially not if it’s going in my main electrical service panel.
Do they even make breakers like you want? I haven’t ever seen anything like that but I haven’t really looked either.
stay away from your main electrical panel.
the chances of killing you and/or your family are too high if you don’t know what you are doing.
I’ve been an electrician for 40 years working with high voltages in nuclear power plants and industrial manufacturing and I rarely need to go into my home service panel and if I do I’m really particular and careful about what I do in there.
I concur with the advice above. Smart breakers are not the right solution for power monitoring, and Tuya-based hardware, privacy and reliability issues aside, is not anywhere near the quality I would trust to put inline of my home’s power.
Current transformer (e.g. clamp) based power monitors are far more appropriate, and can fail cleanly without taking out your home’s wiring. Check out Emporia Vue, which has a cloud-based monitor with either 8 or 16 branch circuit clamps in addition to your two mains. I use a similar offering from Fusion Energy that works without the cloud requirement.
You don’t swap out primary physical breakers with smart ones, you would only add them in line with the physical only ones to allow electricians the ability to lock out a breaker when working on a circuit to prevent accidental power on the line by someone thinking it should be on.
If you want to install them instead of clamp based power monitoring then make sure they match the same rating as the ones currently installed.
I would also advise to get z-wave or zigbee based ones and avoid anything tuya wifi based as those are the ones that require an always active internet connection to allow even basic monitoring and control. z-wave and zigbee are fully local only connections (not aware of anything matter and thread based at this time).
Thanks @peterxian! I hadn’t seen the Fusion Energy products. Apparently it uses 2.4GHz WiFi and claims to be able to integrate with HA without a cloud connection. Pretty good price, too:
Any cloud solution is a non-starter for me. Zigbee or Z-Wave would have been better, but as long as it’s fully local and the vendor can’t yank that out with a firmware update, I’m OK with WiFi.
I agree with all of the posts above. You don’t want (and will have a heck of a time finding) replacement breakers which can be manipulated remotely.
[Side note: Fusion Energy is a really dumb company name. SEO is going to be a real challenge for them!]
Thank you everyone for your input! And I agree with all of the points made. I didn’t know there was such a thing as clamp on monitors. I have taken a photo of the inside of my panel and see there is tons of room for them! So I will look into this option instead! Thank you!
I have a main and 2 sub electrical panels, and each has an Emporia Vue device in it so I can monitor every circuit breaker. I agree that it being cloud based isn’t ideal, but I’m not prepared to go cloud-less at this point in time.
It’s worked out very well for me, and has helped me save a lot while identifying some issues I needed to have addressed.
I had some cloud-dependent stuff too, before I knew any better. Now I’m down to just my thermostats. Like Bob, it’s not worth it to me to change them out, but I would if Honeywell ever went to a subscription model or killed off their servers.
I will say that, for something like thermostats, it’s good to have a backup method of accessing them remotely, should HA fail. They do run totally “local” in that I can set them, and they would continue to run their schedule, all inside the thermostat with no remote connection at all.
Still, for something like power monitoring, direct to HA is the far better solution.
I did notice another brand, with hardware very similar to what’s in the link above, came up for me in Amazon. The price is within $20 or $30. But what I found most interesting is that both of them, right there in the description, mentioned that they support HA and local control. This is great news. It means that sellers recognize the value in those features. I hope more of them catch on!
I have two SPAN smart panels.
Power monitoring at the breaker level (including main and all lugs) is great BUUUUUUT.
If you don’t have a reason to replace your entire panel - don’t. Sure rip and replace is a nice clean way of doing power monitoring and SPAN even does it while it uses standard Square D QO equipment with monitors but… You can basically get 80% of the same experience with clamps (and what I had intended to do before the Texas snowmageddon event cratered my exterior main panel. Insurance is exactly why I chose the Cadillac experience.) and you don’t run into a reinspection in most cases.
With insurance assistance and warranty or new installation… Sure.
SPAN Smart panel (~4K$ usd) / Average Smart breaker (~> 200$ usd per slot) . I see at least 1500$ of leviton breakers there…
Without. Clamps. All the way.
I really wish I had the room in my panel in my unit and or the option to install the shelly 3EM I have still at the main power room side for it; but due to how things are installed here I don’t have the room and the electricians don’t want to work on the setup we have in our meter room to install it.
I currently only have the option to do read outs via the smart meter and the app provided by my energy provider, I posted up a thread about them in another category and someone managed to get an integration working but I still need to proxy the client ID out of the app via an emulator or such when I get around to it lol.
Until then I also use my smart plugs for per device read outs for the main ones that I can use them with and have a T2 relay installed in the socket in a shared laundry room to monitor and prevent power theft.
OK, I just noticed… That CT Clamp system in the Amazon link above has 16 clamps.
My panel has 20 breaker slots.
Do I need to clamp both sides of the 240V double breakers, or is it good enough to clamp one leg and just double it? (This is a N. American 120/240 split phase system.)
I didn’t see any 20-clamp sets on Amazon.
One clamp on either leg will work since it’s still single phase - assuming the load isn’t also getting a neutral.
But it looks like you don’t need CT’s for all 20 breaker spaces - unless you plan to fill that panel with breakers.
Oh, it’s quite full. Two of the slots have double 120V breakers.
But thanks for the quick reply on the 240V breakers. I guess the 16-clamp version will work for me.
… And kill you.
The screws in circuit breakers have torque specifications. Only the most experienced electricians bother to buy a torque screwdriver. When I bought one to add some breakers to my panel, I was surprised to find that all of the original breakers in my panel were under-torqued. Any electrician knows that loose wire connections (breakers, switches, plugs) are a source of home fires.
Connector terminal torque is a control measure designed to stop fires caused by half-day meter replacement courses which generated false competence.
The most important point when terminating stranded cables is to tighten, wiggle, allow the copper to “rest”, then tighten again.
Yes, “there is no such thing as a torque-calibrated arm”, but friends in a DSO replaced THOUSANDS of meters and overhead conductors without torque screwdrivers. The key is they served apprenticeships - back when Henley blocks had soft brass screws, rather than plated steel (many brands changed material not for cost, but to resist abuse).
And before you ask, yes, I have a torque screwdriver and use it. 
In the absence of a torque screwdriver, as @FloatingBoater suggests tighten, wiggle, tighten again. I will add, come back a few weeks later and repeat. I assure you they will all be loose.
