Noble Carbon will show how it’s making EV charger installs painless at TechCrunch Disrupt

Noble Carbon has built a smart circuit breaker intended to simplify adding electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps, or induction stoves to homes without requiring a costly main panel upgrade. The breakers can modulate how much electricity they supply to connected loads in real time, which lets new high-draw devices operate even when a panel is otherwise at capacity. The company argues that most residential electrical panels are sized to meet brief peak demand events that occur only a few hours per year. Noble Carbon’s breakers respond to such situations by reducing power to the appliances they control so the total house draw stays within the panel’s limits, rather than forcing a wholesale panel replacement. According to the firm, control of the three to six largest loads in a home is often sufficient to avoid a main panel upgrade. Co-founder and CEO Jared Lebos, who was motivated by experiences with rolling blackouts in South Africa, built the product with co-founder and CTO Andrew Crane. Spencer Fields, the company’s head of marketing, described the approach and its practical application to TechCrunch. The devices are designed to fit into existing panel slots and, the company says, can be installed in under five minutes; some employees have tested the breakers in their homes for more than a year. Noble Carbon’s breakers are currently being evaluated for UL certification and the startup is partnering with utility Eversource to deploy units in up to 200 multifamily residences in Massachusetts. The company is one of 200 startups participating in this year’s TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at Disrupt, where 20 finalists will be chosen to present on the main stage in October.