The vision of Koolbridge Energy, after years of prepping, scaling and refining, has come to fruition, and its Smart Load Center is ready to empower homeowners with personalized control over their energy management, company officials said.

Founded in 2013, Koolbridge Energy partnered with Sturdy Corp. in 2024 to manufacture the Smart Load Center.

“I met with Dave Sturdy, and it ended up being a five-hour meeting. It was fate,” Stephen Burnett, chairman and co-founder of Koolbridge Energy, said about his company’s partnership with Sturdy, which has 200 employees between two manufacturing facilities in Wilmington and in England.

“They had it all covered: design, the electrical engineering, the embedded software, from inception to completion. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is exactly what we needed,’” Burnett added.

The Koolbridge Solar Smart Load Center, Koolbridge’s flagship product, is an innovation in home energy management, officials said. The system features the ability to transition between utility, solar, battery, and generator power sources on a circuit-by-circuit basis, optimizing electricity costs based on various factors such as time of day, battery status, inverter output and weather conditions, according to the company.

The product’s load-shedding capabilities employ proprietary smart algorithms and microcontroller technology to automatically reduce peak demand and shed unnecessary loads. In addition, its grid outage resilience enables homeowners to autonomously utilize solar power during grid outages, preserving essential circuits for uninterrupted operation, Burnett said.

“Our system works with two busbars and one is not connected to a utility, so users are able to self-consume from their solar panel, providing free solar energy to the homeowner,” he said.

This idea originated in 1996 following Hurricane Fran’s aftermath. Koolbridge’s co-founder and chief scientist Paul Dent was dealing with an extended power outage and decided there had to be a better solution, a novel technology for a new power box to work with solar.

Burnett explained that the power box, much like the incandescent light bulb, was inefficient and didn’t change for a long time, but Dent was not satisfied with that idea.

“‘What if I put a second bus box connected to a solar panel, a bus box back up to wind, a generator or a computer to make intelligent solutions where a microcontroller relays behind every circuit breaker to get the lowest cost available?’”

This led them on the quest to build what is now their Smart Load Center.

A couple of Craigslist ads introduced Burnett and Dent to a host of “brilliant mechanical engineers and software developers” who believed in the product and the business and worked for stock options.

Decades later, that belief has delivered Koolbridge Energy’s patented smart residential energy management products, now with Underwriters Laboratories approvals secured.

Koolbridge is one of the first companies to design, develop and sell solar-ready, electrical power products that automatically select the most economical use of utility, solar, battery, wind or generator power for homes and businesses on a circuit-by-circuit basis, according to Burnett.

The company has more than 30 U.S. patents and patent pending applications. With the Smart Load Center, there is no power interruption on critical load circuits if the utility grid goes down while using solar power, Burnett said.

“In areas that are prone to ice storms or hurricanes, a lot of people are loving to use solar and have been moving to solar,” he said. “And now that the technology has improved, many customers can upgrade their systems.”