Smart switch? Psh. Leviton wants to smarten up your whole breaker box
The newly cloud-connected Leviton Load Center features intelligent circuit breakers that you can control or monitor from your phone.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
Promising to bring your breaker box into the 21st century, Leviton introduced a new Wi-Fi-enabled load center this week at this year's NAHB International Builders' Show in Las Vegas. Hook it up, and you'll be able to monitor and control each individual circuit in your home direct from your phone.
Simply called the Leviton Load Center, the new breaker box uses a built-in hub to connect your circuit breakers with your router, and with the My Leviton app on your Android or iOS device. Connect everything accordingly, and you'll be able to turn breakers off right from your phone, track their energy usage, or even predict your next power bill.
The Leviton Load Center uses Smart Branch Circuit Breakers to communicate to the My Leviton app.
No word from Leviton yet on what this will cost, but CNET Appliances labs manager and lead technical editor Steve Conaway estimates that it'll be expensive, likely costing at least a few thousand dollars. A dedicated DIY junkie (and the first guy I go to for advice when I need to fix something in my own house), Steve also tells me that he'd consider splurging on the Leviton Load Center in his own home -- his next big project is to go solar, and a connected breaker box would let him monitor his whole-home power consumption with granular, circuit-specific detail.
Short of enthusiastic home hobbyists like Steve, the new Load Center really seems to be aimed at people who build and renovate houses. As demand for smart home tech continues to tick upwards, whole-home upgrades like Leviton's smart breaker box might be the sort of things that catch the eye of potential home buyers.
"It is easy to install for contractors, provides home builders with a smart, safe and aesthetically pleasing product for their customers, and simplifies the daily lives of homeowners," says Leviton president and chief operating officer Daryoush Larizadeh.
Beyond the smart features, the Leviton Load Center promises a focus on electrical safety, including patented GFCI lockout technology that Leviton claims exceeds UL standards. That, in addition to the ability to turn circuits off in the Leviton app, might help the Load Center feel like a worthy upgrade over retrofit devices like Neurio and Curb that clamp onto your existing breaker box to track its energy use.
Leviton won't have a price for the Load Center locked down until this summer, when it's made available through Leviton's network of electrical distributors.