The Last Dumb Box In An Electrified Home

Look at what’s been bolted onto the typical Aussie home in the last decade. A solar inverter reporting panel output to your phone. A battery that trades with the grid while you sleep. A heat pump hot water system that heats from surplus solar, an EV charger with its own app.

Then open the switchboard. It’s the same thing your parents had, with better breakers and less asbestos. 

• It can’t tell you how much power any individual circuit is using, so when you get a big bill, you are clueless as to why.
• It can’t switch circuits remotely to ensure you don’t overload your main breaker when on-grid
• It can’t switch circuits remotely to ensure you don’t overload your battery when in backup mode.
• It can’t tell you if a breaker’s life-saving protection has failed – depending on you to test them every 6 months with manual test buttons – which nobody does.
• And if one of those breakers trips at 2am it gives you no idea why.

Everything in the house runs through that box, and the box knows nothing. Of all the bits of home electrification, it’s the one still stuck in the last century.

SPAN went first

The first serious attempt came from California. SPAN was founded by a guy who worked on Tesla’s Powerwall 2, and it shows. The SPAN panel replaces the whole breaker box, puts a controllable relay and an energy monitor on each of up to 32 circuits

It looks brilliantly executed. But it’s built for American 120/240V split-phase power and American electrical codes. You can’t buy one here, and that won’t change without a redesign.

Basis gave it a red hot go

Closer to home, Auckland startup Basis has built the first smart switchboard designed to our shared Aussie/Kiwi wiring rules. I read the Gen-1 technical datasheet and the full installation guide, and met the founder this week at the Everything Electric Show (video soon). There’s plenty to admire.

Every circuit gets digital protection you set in software: the breaker rating, the RCD sensitivity (10 or 30 mA), Type A or Type B, and AC arc fault detection. Each circuit is metered, and each can be switched remotely. There’s a surge protector built in. The chunky spring-clamp terminals are a nice touch.

Then I tried to think about how it would work with a typical Australian solar and battery home, and realised it’s not the solution we need.

It’s indoor only. It must be flush-mounted inside a stud wall. In a lot of Australian homes, especially older ones, the switchboard lives in the meter box on an outside wall. The rated operating range tops out at 40°C, which an Adelaide garage passes before lunch in January.

It’s single-phase only, with a 63 A main switch. Three-phase homes are out. For a single-phase house with a heat pump, induction and an EV charger, 63 A works, and the board will switch circuits off dynamically to keep the load under 63A, but it’s tight.

There’s nowhere to put solar and battery gear. The Basis enclosure has no DIN rail. None. No space for the inverter’s main switch, the battery isolator, the backup changeover switch, the inverter’s DIN-mounted power meter, or the CTs the battery needs to see what the house is doing. The install guide’s only guidance on solar and batteries is to connect them to the bottom circuit module so the busbar doesn’t overload. On a modern Aussie job, you’d end up hanging a second enclosure next to the shiny smart one to hold everything that makes the solar and battery work.

There’s no plan for battery backup. The install guide doesn’t mention backup circuits at all. Ironically, per-circuit relays are exactly what you’d need to fix the “wrong circuits on backup” problem that plagues Aussie battery installs.

The digital switchboard Australia needs

We’re electrifying our homes faster than almost anywhere.  The board of the future should be designed for the modern electricity-hungry Aussie home with solar, batteries, EV and backup.

Here’s my dream spec, just in case anyone wants to make one:

Rated for outdoors. If it can’t live in an Australian meter box on a west-facing wall, in the sun, at 45°C, it doesn’t work for most of the country. That means a proper IP rating and a temperature range that suits Birdsville as well as Hobart.

Single and three-phase with main switches sized for an all-electric home with an EV charger.

Surge protection as standard.

Digital protection on every circuit. Per-circuit, programmable RCBOs with metering, configurable sensitivity, Type B where the circuit needs it, rated for reverse feed from inverters, and AC arc fault detection¹.

Self-testing that replaces the six-monthly test. Each circuit should test itself on a schedule, log the result and tell you if it fails. No one tests their RCDs every six months – and that’s a problem.

A proper DIN zone for solar and battery gear. Enough rail for a backup changeover and bypass switch, DIN-mounted power meters and whatever the next battery brand needs. Standard 35 mm rail, so any compliant device fits.

Somewhere to mount the CTs. Right now, current transformers get clipped onto whatever cable the installer can reach, and often end up dangling off a cable, hard to identify and too often backward. Give them a fixed, labelled mounting point on the main conductors, and make the current direction obvious.

Backup built into the design. Either a grid-side section and a backup section, or a whole-home design where the battery feeds the board and software sheds non-essential circuits when the grid drops. The owner should choose what stays on during a blackout, and be able to change their mind without calling a sparky.

It works without the internet. The relays, the protection and the monitoring should all work locally. The cloud should be a convenience. Open APIs so you don’t need proprietary monitoring or control software.

Non-proprietary modules, or a guarantee. Standard form factors that other makers can supply.

A pocket for the SLD, with a sign. Every solar and battery install should come with a single-line diagram showing how the system is wired. In my experience, they’re missing from almost all switchboards. The board of the future should have a dedicated pocket inside the door with “SLD GOES HERE – DON’T BLOODY SKIP IT!” printed on it in large letters.

Over to you, Basis

Basis has already done the hard part: digital, per-circuit protection certified to AS/NZS standards, in a product people can buy. What’s missing for Australia is mostly the box around it. An outdoor enclosure, a three-phase version and a DIN zone for solar and battery gear.

If you’re a sparky, tell me in the comments what I’ve missed. You open a helluva lot more switchboards than I do.