 Hi, I'm Nate Adams. Welcome back to the third piece of the Electify Everything course. And we're going to talk about what size panel do you need. A really common question, a very important question. And I tend to think in heuristics, I try to think of ways to simplify making a decision one way or another. And so I'm going to walk you through how I think of sizing panels. And this is not the correct way to do it. So I call it non coaster. This is a shortcut. But it's one way to get a pretty good idea of whether you need to upgrade or not. Because it's not a cheap upgrade to do. I'll talk about it later. It's like three to $6,000 depending on the complexity of the project and where you are. More expensive markets are going to be more expensive. All right. And again, this is the third piece of the Electify Everything course. And so for starters, you want to go in your basement or go outside or wherever your main breaker is and see what size it is. So it's either going to be 100, 150 or 200, unless you happen to have one of the few houses out there with the 400 amp service. But if you do, your house is probably, you know, 5000 square feet or more, and you've got multiple systems. So the good news is 200 amps works for most houses. And it's not that hard to get done. And here's what I mean when I say that. So 200 amps will run one central HVAC system. So it depends on the house. But we find somewhere in the three to 4000 square foot range is where most builders start moving to using two HVAC systems. And it's mainly about the backup heat, which we'll get to later, the resistance heat. But this will run one system, no problem. And then it will run a couple of EVs, and then it'll run the rest of the house. And the other good news is that 100 amps is oftentimes enough to do it. So we have done 13 electrifications and two of them were on 100 amp panels. I think we only did upgrades in two or three others. Everybody else had 200 amps already. So this can work. And I'm not the only one saying that this can work. So John Semelhack, who's a good buddy of mine, and you want to follow him on Twitter, he is out there also doing electrifications. He does more new build than retrofits. But we have fun competing with each other and busting each other's chops. So he has an all electric house and then also an apartment for his mom or mother-in-law. And all of that fits on a 200 amp panel. And he hasn't broken 50% of load. So that's a 200 amp, but there you go. That's actually two HVAC systems that it's working. And then Paul, who if I am correct, wrote a book on residential energy efficiency. But I know that he watches his usage very, very closely. So he only has a 100 amp service. And so he's getting there. And like you said, he rarely breaks five kilowatts, which is 5,000 watts. And we're going to be thinking in watts here. That is the easiest way to get this done. So let's dig into the non coaster method. So again, heuristics, if you take 100 amps times 220 volts, that gives you 22,000 watts is the maximum you can pull on a 100 amp breaker. Now, technically, they're supposed to allow more before they trip. So this is not perfect. Again, non coaster. Hear me. But 22,000 watts is the high end of what you want to do with 100 amps. 200 amps, you double that, you get to about 44,000. And by the way, I'll give you a link to the right way to do this at the end. But for starters, this will get your head working on it. So what you do is you want to add up how many watts things use at your house if everything was on at the same time, which is not going to happen much, if at all, when you look at everything. So if you can stay under 22,000 watts, you can use a 100 amp panel, or you might be able to use, I should say. I feel like I need to put in the this is not investment advice kind of thing. Get local boots on the ground help with this. But this is meant to, again, be a heuristic for you. So I don't like putting a ton of stuff on slides, but I'm breaking that for this. So let's take a look at a bunch of different appliances and how much they pull. So a standard electric resistance dryer pulls 4,500 watts when it's running an induction stove pulls between four and 6000 watts max. So that would be the oven and burners running. So keep that in mind on demand electric water heaters. We are not big fans of these and you will see why. So if you run one that is large enough to actually do two showers simultaneously, it's going to be 20,000 watts. You only have 22 on a 100 amp panel. So you don't want to do that. A resistance tank to water heater. So plain old electric resistance tank is 4,500 watts. Heat pump water heaters are amazing here. They only pull 4 to 600 watts. So they run longer, but they don't pull much when they're running. And we're concerned about peak more so than usage on this. And they also use two thirds or even three quarters less energy than either of these two to get their job done. Central heat pumps and just heat pumps in general, they're basically a thousand watts per ton. So if you have a two ton, that's 2,000 watts. If you have a five ton, which is the largest standard residential one, that will pull about 5,000 watts when it's running. If you have variable speed equipment, though, it will run considerably less power than that. But that's what you want to keep in mind. Backup resistance heat for when it's really cold or the compressor goes out, things like that. On the small side, it's going to be 5kW or 5,000 watts, or up to a 20kW or 20,000 watts. So this right here, this line item is basically what is going to decide what size panel you need. This is the most important one because this is legitimately going to run for some time in most homes. EV chargers, they're going to vary between 3,000 watts and 20,000 watts. And you want to watch what you're doing there depending on your panel size. Hot tubs pull a ton, 4 to 6,000 watts, and they run a lot. So I've seen hot tubs add 5,000 kWh a year to client bills here in Cleveland. And it's not that uncommon to see houses where all of their electric use for normal stuff, so refrigerator, lights, appliances, all that stuff comes in at 5,000 kilowatt hours. So hot tubs use a ton of energy and they use it all the time, at least whenever it's cold out. So you want to keep that in mind. That may necessitate a 200 amp panel. Well pumps, if you are like me and live in the country and have well water, those pull a pretty good chunk. Always on, which I'm borrowing from Sense Energy Monitor, you're usually, you're always going to have 200 to 1,000 watts going in your house, depending on your habits. Computers, a laptop's 50, desktop is 500 if it's like a gaming computer. And this is probably clear by now, but 1000 watts is known as a KW or a kilowatt. So when you see that elsewhere, that'll go. But watts are definitely the easiest way to think about all of this. And it's what energy monitors measure, which is what we'll look at. So speaking of looking at it, let's look at a 100 amp upgrade that we did for a client. So in this case, it was a bunch of condos put together. And the main line was underneath the slab of the slab house and then ran underneath the garage floor and then popped up and the breaker was on the other side. So there was no easy way to upgrade this. And so we discussed it and looked at it and decided to just stick with 100 amp. So here's what she has in her house. She has an electric dryer. She has an induction stove. She has a heat pump water heater. She has a two ton heat pump. She has a kind of small backup strip, which is perfect for her house, because it's only 1200 square feet, and it's got a pretty low load. So that's more than she needs. She has an EV charger for her Chevy Volt. And her always on is about 200 watts. She really sips energy. So the worst case total if we add all these up is in the 25,000 watt range. So yes, that breaks the 22. But let's talk more about that. So here's the realistic peak is more like 15,000. So these are the things that might actually be hitting all at the same time would be the electric dryer, the induction stove and the backup resistance. But these are not going to run for long and they're probably not going to run all at the same time like the backup resistance, you need that on really cold nights. So if that's going to be kicking, it's probably going to be kicking between say 2am and 7am. So you may be able to avoid that. And then you just have to be careful running other appliances. But here's a really key point. So at the bottom there note the heat pump water heater is clutch in doing this. Because if we had the 4500 watts electric resistance tank, there'd be real danger of actually peg in the 22,000. So to be clear, the heat pump water heaters and we'll be talking about this in one of the other sections. They are electric resistance tanks, they just have a heat pump on top. So it can run the resistance electric. That's the backup should the heat pump fail. But in general, those are only going to pull forward 600 watts. So realistically, these are the three things that are quite likely to run at the same time for heat pump water heater, the heat pump, and the EV charger. So you know, it's an electric car with a three KW charger is going to take, it could be a couple of hours, it could be eight hours, it might even be 12 hours to fully charge depending on what it is. This is a volt. So it only has about a 10 kilowatt hour battery. And so it doesn't take that long to charge that. Now the keys if you want to run on a 100 amp panel is you need to run a 10 KW backup resistance strip maximum. That's your limit. That's all you can really do. You need to run a heat pump water heater pretty much for sure. And you need to stay on the small side for your EV charger. You may need to stick to 110 even 110 pulls about 1500 watts or 1.5 KW. So let's look at data from this electrification. So when I was pulling these slides together, I just went in this is her sense energy monitor. We aren't using these nearly as much anymore because they aren't very good at catching variable loads. But their app is still hands down the best of anyone out there. And it's a very fast install. So if you're nervous about something, this is a nice product to use. But right here, you can see this is her heat pump turning on this is what an inverter variable speed heat pump looks like when they kick on. So see it ramps up. But it ramps up pretty gradual. And if you look at a single stage or two stage, they just go bang, and it'll be a big spike come up and come back down and then go that can be pretty hard on a bunch of things. But inverters start up slow. And you can see just kind of gradually increases how much it's pulling. There's a number of reasons for that. And then she had something that she turned on here. So she peaked at 3200 watts. So what you need to do then if you're going to look at this from a data perspective, you want to keep zooming out so that you can see what the real peak is. And this is again doing this posthumously because we know what the house is using. And so 7200 watts is what her peak was in the 24 hours when I was looking at this. And then I backed up to look at an entire month and her peak was 9400. So again, 22,000 is our max. She's not even getting beyond half that with how the house is operating. And this is another screen from sense that's really nice. They can let you compare how you're doing to other users. So notice other sense homes in Ohio, about 2200 watts on average, they're pulling. She is pulling about 1350. This is stinking amazing. So she's naturally a frugal person, and she's frugal with her energy. So this is pretty much our best electrification example right now. But 1350 watts on average, and that's really pretty crazy, because you can bet this average is in houses that have furnaces. So they're using gas and electric. This is just all electric. And she has an electric car and drives almost all of her miles on electric. So it's technically it's a hybrid, but the volts mainly run on electric. So in last month, she used about 1100 kilowatt hours. This is December of 2020. Now this is our most energy intensive electrification. This is about a 3000 square foot split level, and also has an EV. And we size this heat pump very aggressively. So it runs a fair amount of resistance electric. But you can see she is averaging 5500 watts. So that is considerably more than the average. And she also has a pretty big solar system. She's got about a 15kw system, which in the winter time, they really suck wind here, particularly if there's any snow. So in December, she used about 3800 kilowatt hours. So that was an expensive month. But it averages out over the year, which is really important to note. So if you're nervous about some of the big bills, there's a bunch of different ways you can deal with that. But going on budget billing can be really helpful. So let's look at another month. So here's September. And again, this is her EV. This is everything in the house. This is air conditioning heat. This is everything. She used 950 kilowatt hours for September. And then her solar system was producing well at that point. So she got 1265 kilowatt hours. So this is a nice piece of the Sense app. Now the kosher method, I just want to refer you here so that once you watch this, if you want to go through and do the math the right way, which should be easier to do now that you understand this. But I look at the kosher method, just get annoyed, frankly. Like that just sounds like a pain in the neck. So do we have good odds of being able to use 100 amp or do we need to upgrade? And you can just add up what appliances the house is going to get and getting an idea. But John Herod wrote this great article and a green building advisor. And it's does your electrification project require a service upgrade. If you are at all in doubt, unless you have a giant house with a whole bunch of HVAC systems, 200 amps is going to do the job. Just put one in. So you're looking at three to six grand, like I mentioned earlier. And that runs one HVAC system with backup resistance that'll run up to about 20kw, which is the most you're going to put in. So that will usually handle up to 4000 square feet, give or take 3000 quite easily. It depends on your climate and how tight your house is a bunch of other things. But that will also run two EVs. It'll run three or four if you need to. Very seldom are you going to come home with two completely drained electric cars. You may have one that's really drained, but the other one probably only needs, you know, a quarter charge, something like that. And so you can share the chargers are smart like that, or many of them are to where they will balance what is needed. And then of course, that'll run the rest of the house. So this is a common thing to keep in mind. Do you need a sub panel? So a sub panel is this little panel that is on the right that I put an arrow on top of it. And so if you are out of breaker space, which is pretty common, that doesn't mean you have to upgrade the panel to a larger size, or even change that panel. It just means you need to add a sub panel that has space for more breakers, which is what is happening here. So you use two breaker spaces in this panel. And then you run it over to this so you can actually see down here is where they ran it. You got the big red and the black coming off for a hundred amp sub panel. And we'll talk about this in one of the other pieces. But a hundred amp sub panel is kind of ideal for garage, because then you can run a bunch of EVs off of that. And if you happen to be a welder or something like that, you can you can run that too. But a sub panel can oftentimes save you from having to do big upgrades, if your main breaker is big enough to be able to do the job. And another thing that I highly recommend is decide with data. Anybody that has followed me for any length of time knows that we look for every possible way to measure stuff, because you never know what you're going to learn. It always cracks me up and somebody's like, What are you going to learn when you try this? Like, I don't know, I'm just going to go measure and we'll see what comes up. And you always learn stuff. So even if you do this before your electrification, the Emporia view, this is a really nice little product. But it lets you see what your peaks are. And up until now, any of these monitors that had a bunch of separate CTs current transmitter clamps, that's what these are here, any of these that were out there started at 600 bucks. So that was part of the reason we use sense is 300. So it was the least expensive option. But since does not do a good job of picking up variable speed loads. So like we use variable speed heat pumps, and I can't see them. And it's annoying. It missed my car quite a bit. So I sadly had to sell it. When we switched to something we could pull our camper with. But I had a Chevy Volt. And it was really fun to watch that, see what it was using, and learn a bunch of things from watching it. But I could watch it with this, however, the sense did not pick the car up most of the time. It only picked up maybe half the usage and it took it about a year to find it. So this is now the least expensive option out there. It's 100 to 150 bucks. It's 100 bucks for one that has eight of these. And it's 150 for one that has 16. And they just added voltage monitoring, which they didn't have in the first generation. So I didn't know if you were running 115 volts or 125 volts. And those are in normal range. So it could throw the accuracy off. But they have added that for the second generation as of a couple months ago. So it seems like with everything electric, there are really good options coming out. And this is another hole that is now filled. And by the way, this is the only affiliate thing I'm going to have in here. But like I said, it's 100 to 150 bucks. If you use the code, Nate the house whisperer, you get 5% off and then I get a 5% cut. So if you find value from this, and you're going to buy one of those anyway, just type in Nate the house whisperer, you'll save a couple bucks, and then I get a couple too. So thank you in advance. And so that's that's it the non kosher method. That's basically add up what you got. So for 100 amp panel, the 22,000 watts max and 10 kW heat strip max for a 200 amp panel, you need to stay under 44,000. And that's going to handle the vast majority of houses in the US, because the vast majority are under 3000 square feet and have one HVAC system. And even if you have two. So like say you have an upstairs downstairs and you're North Carolina or something like that. If you stay under if you put two five kW heat strips on each one of those, you're under 10 kW. So you may still be able to make that work. Although most houses are going to have two systems are probably new enough that they have a 200 amp anyway. And that's that. So if you happen to find this video by accident and you aren't part of the electrify everything course, I'll be putting a link below just as I will have a link for the Emporia view. So I hope this is helpful. Thanks for coming through the third part of the electrify everything course. And I'll see you next time. I'm Nate Adams.