Remotely Operated Circuit Breakers (Main Electrical Service)

Home Control Software
1

Since I purchased this house in 1998, I noticed that the internal panel bus assembly was cocked outward on the right side, which did not allow the breakers to line up with the cover plate cut-outs for the breakers.

Since 1998, the assembly has cocked outward even more and I am afraid that it may cause some problems one day. I believe that it is time to replace the Main Service Panel. This is the one area of Home Automation/Control that there is not much in the way of products.

I started researching and came up with Square D (here in the USA) that has “Remote Controlled Circuit Breakers” for the main electrical service panel. Well the best way to see if this is a product that is worth the $$$$.$$, is to at least purchase one breaker and run a test on it.

I received the breaker ($45) the other day and the fun began. Oh, I also made a short YouTube video to share with everyone. So, read up on the breaker specifications and it requires 24VDC to operate the breaker electronically. There is a 6" (3) wire pigtail. The Red wire connects to +24VDC, the Black wire connects to Negative and the White wire is the common lead. When you connect the common lead to +24Volts it turns the breaker on. When you connect the common lead to Negative it turns the breaker off.

Time to pull out the 24volt power supply, a couple relays, LED, and an Arduino.

I wired up the breaker to the 24Volt power supply (red and black leads) and to the 5VDC relays. I connected the common lead to the relays. Connected the relay control leads to the Arduino and wrote a basic script to test out the relay.

The outcome is in the following short YouTube video.

2

That is a nice find. Have you gotten further with this?

3

What you are actually describing is a contactor or a beefed up relay, with a 24V-DC coil.
Contactors usually come as DIN rail mounting whereas relays can have a variety of plugin bases.
It’s debatable if it’s remotely controlled.
Anything that needs a separate coil supply could be called remotely controlled and could depend on cable length and definition of remote.
The big difference between contactors and relays is the fact they are designed to switch large currents and have contacts designed not to weld as a safety measure.
I always use contactors to switch large appliances like water heaters.
24V-DC is a popular control panel voltage.
You can get contactors where the coil is changeable to whatever common voltage you like, but if you get into three phase contactors, you aren’t likely to find low voltage coils because of the extra power required to move 4 contacts