Legrand's Smart Electrical Panel is the fuse box of your smart home dreams

Look, we understand it's hard to get excited about your fuse box, but if you truly want to control your home intelligently, that's where the party starts. Legrand brings in $6 billion dollars annually in its home base of France, and now it's coming for the US market. Its secret weapon? A modular fuse box system that offers not just an overview of your home's electricity use, but lets you control individual outlets, switches, and appliances.

Legrand's smart fuse box is called the Smart Electrical Panel (because they don't call it a fuse box in France). To get started, you'll need the $80 Wi-Fi gateway, and a few of the $60 modules that look like individual breakers. Get really stuck in and you can also buy things like a Smart Load Shedder that'll let you prioritize the Xbox and TV after 9 p.m. and deprioritize the water heater.

Works with existing systems –– With smart home kit, it's always wonderful to be able to start with a fresh build, line the walls with fiber optics and make sure every tap and bidet is voice-controlled. But in reality, most people have an existing home they'd like to retrofit. Legrand's system can happily connect to whatever you're using now, works with the Zigbee 3.0 standard, and plays nice with Apple's HomeKit, Google Assistant or Amazon's Alexa.

The Legrand Home+Control app doesn't just let you see granular information on usage, it also lets you schedule individual switches or appliances.

Netatmo for pedigree –– If you've never heard of Legrand, that may be because you're not an electrician. But you've probably heard of smart camera and weather-kit maker Netatmo. Well, Legrand bought Netatmo in 2018 and installed then CEO Fred Potter as CTO of Legrand's connected devices division.

If you want to go from smart home Padawan to smart home Sith Lord, you'll be able to pick up Legrand's gear from major retailers later this month.