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Electrification | Education

What your electric panel actually does

by Lyn Stoler | October 3, 2024

Most parts of your home are so obviously easy to understand: the washing machine washes your clothes. The dishwasher does your dishes. The sink gives you water. The oven gets hot. The smoke detector is supposed to warn you about fires, but generally just beeps at you when you’re trying to cook.

But what in the world does the breaker panel do?

The answer is actually simple — and understanding it can give you a better idea of how your home works. But, of course, there’s no default owners’ manual for a home that teaches you what you need to know about a breaker, so most people’s experience is something like this:

• You try running a bunch of appliances at once, trip the breaker, and need to go flip a switch. 

• If you ever hire an electrician, they ask where the breaker is (and you see them working on it).

• If you want to install something like an induction stove, you’re asked about the breaker’s capacity.

These experiences may have taught you that the breaker is important, which is true. This essay is going to teach you what it actually does, how it works, and what all the numbers on it mean. Because it is, fortunately, a lot less complicated than it sounds.

What does your electrical panel do?

Think of your breaker as a router: it takes the electricity from your utility and distributes it in usable quantities throughout your home.

Your electrical panel takes electricity from your utility and then distributes it throughout your home on circuits — powering everything from your outlets to your largest appliances.
Your electrical panel takes electricity from your utility and then distributes it throughout your home on circuits — powering everything from your outlets to your largest appliances.

The power lines in your neighborhood, in other words, aren’t directly connected to all of your appliances and outlets. They connect to your breaker panel, which then — via something called circuits — distributes that power to the places you need it. This is also why you may have heard your breaker panel referred to as your “circuit” panel: it’s where the circuits in your house start.

Circuits, by the way, are just loops of electricity through your home. They start and end at your breaker panel. A circuit to your living room might start with a wire from your panel, run through your walls, connect to some outlets, and then come back to the panel. 

You can think of circuits similar to how water gets distributed throughout your home: the sink and shower in your bathroom are connected to a pipe that distributes water to the bathroom. The lights in the bathroom are powered in a similar way, except the pipe is a circuit (physically, a wire) carrying electricity.

All those plastic switches you see when you look at your breaker panel are the switches to individual circuits throughout your home. Flip the one that connects to the bathroom, for example, and you won’t be able to use the power in your bathroom. Flip the main switch for the whole house, and it’s (literally) lights out.

What do the numbers on your breaker panel mean?

Breakers have limitations: you can’t run unlimited amounts of electricity through them and into your home. And if you’ve looked at your breaker panel before, you may have noticed that all those switches to circuits on your breaker have different numbers on them. Here is why:

• Your breaker has a maximum volume of electricity it can handle at once (measured in amps).

• Each circuit has a maximum volume of electricity it can handle at once (also measured in amps).

Quick definition: Amps are just a measurement for an amount of current. If electricity were water, amps would be water volume. 

Your breaker, for example, may be able to handle 100 amps — a common standard for American homes. And the ratings for your circuits might be something like 15 amps, 20 amps, 30 amps, or 50 amps. Circuits rated for more amps are probably powering energy-hungry appliances or rooms (like your oven), and circuits rated for less are probably powering less (like outlets in your bedroom).

You may notice that the panel in the diagram above is rated for 100 amps, but the circuit ratings add up to 150 amps. And this is the only confusing bit about breakers: the amount of amperage you can dedicate to circuits is higher than the amount of amperage the breaker can theoretically handle. 

This is actually less worrisome than it first appears. Think about it — when was the last time you plugged a power-sucking device into every single outlet in your house and turned on all the appliances at the same time? You (probably) don’t do this, which is why it’s possible to ‘oversubscribe’ your breaker like in the image above. Deciding on the amount of amperage you can dedicate to circuits, in reality, is less of a simple math equation and more of a thoughtful calculation done by your electrician.

Why breaker panels can be a problem for electrification

Most homes in the United States are built with the idea that you’re going to rely on natural gas. 38% of homes in the United States use natural gas to cook, and 52% use natural gas to heat their homes. 

But what if you want to electrify — like switching from gas to induction, or from natural gas heating to a heat pump? After all, there are billions of government dollars that’ll help you electrify, most electric is better for the environment, and besides, many of the electric appliances today are simply better.

If you decide you want an induction stove, for example, then the issue of the breaker panel becomes complicated. An induction stove will often require a 40, 50, or 60-amp circuit, which is a huge chunk of your panel capacity. And not only is it a big chunk, but your panel wasn’t wired to expect that you’d need to power your stovetop with electricity — so it may simply not have the capacity. Getting a new panel installed can cost $3k+, so an exciting electrification project can quickly become a painful expense.

One way to avoid the panel problem 

A clever way to get around the panel problem is to invest in electric appliances that have lower amp requirements. There are a lot of options out there, but most of them tend to suffer from low power output — which means poor performance. 

Of course, Impulse’s batteries mean that we get the best of both worlds. Our batteries mean that we can attach to lower power circuits, store power slowly, and then release it quickly when you’re cooking. This makes our appliances insanely powerful — 5 times more powerful than the best gas stoves on the market. But it also means that we only use up a tiny bit of your panel’s capacity: 15 amps.

The upshot? If you’re out of space on your panel, there’s two ways Impulse can help: 

  1. If you’re interested in electrifying your stove but are running out of space on your panel, then an Impulse Cooktop can help you avoid the cost, hassle, and delays of panel and electrical service upgrades. 

  2. Or, if you already have an electric stove and want to add other electrical loads (say, an EV charger or a heat pump), then you can switch out your current power-hungry electric stove with an Impulse Cooktop to free up more space on your panel. Plus, then you get to cook on Impulse 

If you’re looking to electrify, you’ll likely become well-acquainted with your electrical panel. If that panel becomes a barrier towards achieving the fully-electrified, powerful home of your dreams, then Impulse can help. 

Learn more about Impulse here.

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Lyn Stoler is the Climate and Policy Lead at Impulse Labs. In addition to writing (and illustrating!) our electrification blog posts, she manages our policy and energy partnerships. If you want to talk energy, electrification, and more, you can reach out to her at enterprise@impulselabs.com.

LS
Lyn Stoler