Schneider Electric unveiled at last week’s virtual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) products that bring more safety and control while delivering sustainable energy management choices directly to homeowners.

This is an expansion of the French firm’s Wiser smart home ecosystem, furthering discussion around the smart and sustainable home. The Wiser range aims to create affordable, sustainable, energy efficient, resilient and personalised homes.

Anchored by the Square D energy centre, these products enable residential insights and monitoring capabilities for homeowners to control and lower their home’s energy consumption and electrical heating and cooling costs by up to half.

“Our homes are expected to become the single largest greenhouse gas emitters over the next decade,” said Manish Pant, executive vice president at Schneider Electric. “As consumers equip their homes with more connected devices, the ability to control and manage home energy consumption will be non-negotiable. A secure, interoperable power management system is key to ensuring consumers live sustainably even at home, by keeping energy cost and CO₂ emissions to a minimum. Our new product empowers consumers to make better energy choices, and to take active control over their energy needs.”

Square D can now help combat the likelihood of homes becoming the single largest greenhouse gas emitters over the next decade, by transforming homes from simply smart to smart and sustainable. It’s a step towards enabling net zero, self-sufficient homes, and bringing sustainable energy choices directly to consumers.

By connecting a smart thermostat, smart meter, back-up generator and solar inverter with an AI-driven energy management system, Square D takes a proactive energy management approach, addressing key pain points of resilience and effective energy management in the home.

All electrical energy from the home and grid can now converge in a single panel where load control is managed directly from grid to plug. From swimming pools to heating to appliances, such as freezers and washing machines, in two parts: critical and normal loads. If an outage is caused by adverse weather, for example, the panel switches to critical load mode. At this point, it decides if appliances such as the fridge are essential, then the energy supply is switched to these appliances only.

Square D seamlessly enables the convergence, scalability and optimisation of residential distributed energy resources, including utility power, solar power, energy storage, future smart home devices and generators. With digital control from a single app, the power source can be changed to ensure resiliency and to reduce costs.

The Square D panel can monitor solar energy usage and track against the costs of utility power to optimise energy sourcing to reduce costs. For example, electric vehicles are high load and expensive to charge at peak time. The panel can help manage these costs by identifying the best time of day to charge the vehicle or switch to solar for charging to avoid higher energy rates.

Square D embeds seamlessly into properties, integrating batteries and energy measurements from the grid and the home. There’s no need to make a gateway or new protocols as it fits straight in with existing home energy management systems, controlled by the homeowner from a single app. Electricians can save installation time as the pre-wired panel arrives already assembled.