SPAN Smart Panel Certified Installer
5 Star Electrical Services is a SPAN certified installer serving San Luis Obispo County and northern Santa Barbara County. We are a licensed C-10 electrical contractor, license #973698, bonded and insured. A SPAN smart panel replaces your existing main panel and manages load across the whole house, with circuit-level monitoring and control from an app. It matters most when you are adding solar, battery backup or EV charging and need those loads to coexist with your existing service. Installed, a SPAN panel runs $9,500 to $10,500. Call (805) 215-4503 or book a free estimate online.
What a SPAN Panel Does
SPAN is a load management panel. If your home is on 100 amp service and already at capacity, and you want to add an EV charger, SPAN can communicate with the charger and reduce its load to keep the total inside what your service can carry. That can avoid a full service upgrade. It also gives you circuit-level monitoring and control from an app, so you can see what each circuit is using and decide what has priority during an outage or a peak.
What It Costs
The SPAN panel itself is about $4,500. Installation, including the additional breakers and labor, runs $5,000 to $6,000. Installed, that is $9,500 to $10,500. Every job is quoted as a flat price in writing before work begins. There are no trip or mileage charges anywhere in our service area.
When SPAN Is the Right Choice — and When It Is Not
SPAN makes sense when you are adding several large loads that have to coexist — a charger plus a heat pump plus battery backup — or when the alternative is an underground service upgrade at $10,000 to $30,000. It is not the cheapest way to add a single EV charger: a load-managing charger installed runs $3,300 to $5,300 and does the same job for that one load. And a straightforward main panel replacement runs $3,000 to $4,000. We will tell you plainly which one fits your situation.
Start With a Load Assessment
A SPAN install starts the same way every other option does: a $150 load assessment. We run the load calculation on your existing service, look at what you are trying to add, and tell you whether SPAN is the right answer or whether something simpler will do. The load calculation is required for your building permit either way.
We Do Not Install Solar
A SPAN panel is usually part of a larger project — solar, battery, EV charging or a service upgrade. We do not install solar, which means we will tell you plainly whether your service can carry what you are planning without having a solar sale to protect.