The media could not be loaded. I do not recommend this product. Do not waste your money. Despite slick marketing and apparently a lot of research and development, these smart breakers are among the worst products that Leviton has produced. All of the smart breakers (I tested LB120-DS, LB120-GS, LB120-AS, LB120-S, LB220-S, LB230-S, and LB260-GS) emit a distinct and nauseating hissing noise when they are energized, even when the breaker itself is in the OFF position. The hissing noise is comprised of at least three components: a generic white noise, a high-pitched squeal, and rapid clicking at a rate of maybe 20 to 30 clicks per second. Just one breaker is annoying enough, but if you have a whole load center full of 20-40 of these breakers, it is like living with a brood of vipers. When the load center cover LDC42-W is on, the hissing is muffled, but is still plainly audible for at least 9 to 12 feet. When the cover is off, the breakers are audible from 40 feet away and through at least one open doorway. There is no excuse for this poor design, because standard breakers that only cost a couple of dollars never emit any sound in the first place. I invested several thousand dollars into this equipment, only to find out about this hissing after the LP422-ML load center was fully installed and wired by my electricians. What a waste of money. No other breakers on the market that I am aware of exhibit this annoying hiss. Furthermore, Leviton's non-smart breakers (LB120, LB115, LSPD2, etc.) do not emit any noise whatsoever. The whole point of the Leviton smart load center, however, is to get the smart breakers, not the standard ones. The standard breakers do not make this load center competitive because the load center itself is much more expensive, the standard breakers are still twice the price of other vendors' breakers, and other vendors' breakers are widely available at every electrical supply house around the country. I am so disgusted with Leviton's engineering on this hissing issue that I do not consider the standard (non-smart) breakers to be much of a workaround. It would give me greater peace of mind to return everything and get another vendor's products, even if it means paying my electricans to rewire a new panel. I hope that Leviton takes this matter seriously, recalls its faulty inventory, and redesigns its smart breakers as soon as possible. For a product that is intended to be installed indoors in a residential environment, the only acceptable noise signature is 0dB (no noise). There is absolutely no excuse to charge consumers 3-6x more for breakers that pollute a residential environment with noise like this. Most likely the hissing is coming from AC-DC transformer components inside each breaker to power the radio circuitry, which a Leviton representative told me is Bluetooth-based. This design is clearly shortsighted because each breaker needs a Bluetooth radio and AC-DC transformer, which adds to the cost of each breaker. It would have been far better, more efficient, and less costly to have a low voltage DC supply bus with a single, high-quality transformer in the panel itself (or attached to the panel) that has zero noise emission. Second, there could have been a simple wired data bus that connects between the breakers and the LDATA data hub. In theory there is an isolation advantage by using Bluetooth: in the event of a power surge, the surge would not travel over the data bus to blow out the data hub. However, that argument is a total red herring because LDATA itself is supposed to be powered by the same panel. A catastrophic power surge like a lighting strike will definitely take out everything in the panel anyway. Using Bluetooth just pollutes the 2.4GHz space in the immediate vicinity of the panel. I originally decided to go with the Leviton Smart Load Center because I wanted to upgrade my house to have 24+ circuits, but most home energy monitoring products are capped at 14 to 16 circuits max (examples: Emporia Vue and IoTaWatt). I also found the vast number of CT clamps required by such products in a panel to be excessive and untidy. I eliminated AI-based home energy monitors (examples: Neurio and Sense) because I did not want to babysit an algorithm for months at a time with no guarantee when my devices might randomly appear. At this stage of the Leviton product, however, any of the aforementioned products are better than the Leviton Load Center. Another negative is that Leviton still has not exposed any local network or cloud-based interfaces to monitor and control the system. This was a known limitation before I purchased the product, but I thought that there was a project on GitHub to scrape the Android REST API calls to the MyLeviton Cloud service. I was unable to find such a project while writing this review. The data belongs to the homeowner; there is no credible reason (other than laziness) why this data cannot be exposed locally. Leviton absolutely needs to make this data available on the local network with appropriate access control measures if it wants a useful product. Leviton had a real opportunity to disrupt load center design, and they totally blew it. Forget this product and get something—anything—else.
