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Rooftop solar and home batteries are way more expensive in the U.S. than in most countries, largely due to slow and burdensome local permitting and utility interconnection processes.
But there are tools installers can use to bring down these so-called “soft costs,” which make up about two-thirds of the price of installing solar, batteries, and EV chargers in the U.S.
One of the most effective such tools is called the meter socket adapter — and major home-electrification companies are increasingly making use of it. Over the past few years, companies including Tesla, ConnectDER, and Enphase have won approval from a growing number of utilities to use these devices to circumvent complex electrical work that can add days of labor and thousands of dollars in costs to installations.
Recent regulatory momentum in California, the largest home solar market, is also boosting the tech, which takes the form of a metal ring that’s inserted between utility meters and the meter boxes that connect homes to the grid. Inside each meter socket adapter is all the technology needed to connect, protect, monitor, and control solar, batteries, EV chargers, and other electrical devices.
Using tools like these to decrease soft costs is increasingly important as utility bills climb nationwide and regulatory headwinds threaten to make solar more expensive. Federal tax credits for home electrification expire at the end of this year, and several states have pared back compensation programs for solar owners.
Meter socket adapters are also a no-brainer for installers to use, according to Marcelo Macedo, who previously worked at SolarCity and Tesla and now runs his own installation company, Coastside Clean Energy. He said they can turn a multi-day job into a simple, half-day, plug-and-play exercise, largely because they help standardize projects.
“You can supervise more people doing more work faster, and most importantly, more predictably,” he said. “You can more reliably close out jobs on a tighter time frame with fewer hiccups. Your time to cash flow is more predictable. That leads to saying yes to more jobs, and being able to get more jobs done in a month.”
Meter socket adapters can generate serious — if highly varied — savings.
So says Colby Hastings, senior director of residential energy at Tesla, whose meter socket adapter device called the Backup Switch has been approved for use by dozens of utilities across the country, including Green Mountain Power in Vermont, Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, and all of the biggest utilities in the solar-rich states of Arizona and California.
Where utilities have cleared their use, “the Backup Switch can save thousands of dollars on a typical installation in both material and labor,” she said.
Exact figures depend on the particulars of household meter design and configuration and what equipment is being installed. On average, the Backup Switch can deliver savings of about $335 in hardware costs and about $360 in labor costs per storage installation, according to a report Tesla published this summer. More complicated projects can see greater savings, Hastings said. And Tesla Cybertruck owners get the added benefit of being able to use the Backup Switch to connect their EV battery for home backup power.
Most of those savings come from avoiding the need to relocate key household circuits into a different electrical panel for battery backup, Hastings said. A separate remote energy meter will still be necessary for homes that only want to back up a subset of their circuits. But for whole-home backup setups using a Backup Switch alongside a Powerwall battery, installation can be as quick as “a few hours,” she said, compared to more than a day needed to install equipment and run conduits if a battery is installed without the Backup Switch.
To be clear, meter socket adapters aren’t helpful for every home that wants to go solar. But for those adding solar and storage or an EV charger, it’s more likely than not that they can speed things up and shave some cost.
Home design also matters. Meter socket adapters are particularly useful for homes with meter boxes located right above the circuit breakers. These “meter-main combos” are more common in warmer climates, including California, the country’s top home solar and battery market.
Meter-main combos can make it particularly hard to install home energy tech through the electrical panel, said Raghu Belur, chief product officer at solar microinverter and battery vendor Enphase. Their tight configuration leaves no room for the microgrid controllers that automatically isolate homes when the grid goes down, or the current transformers that can measure power flows on home circuits.
Meter socket adapters simplify things because they integrate all of these devices into a single unit. Enphase has its own meter socket adapter now approved by nearly 50 U.S. utilities.
“It has a powerful 200-amp switch inside it to isolate the home during outages,” Belur said of the device. “That dramatically reduces the balance-of-system costs” and can “save thousands of dollars in labor.”
Meter socket adapters are also far more elegant systems, said John Bergh, CEO of Bay Area solar installation company Cobalt Power Systems. He likened the custom-designed webs of electrical conduits, transfer switches, junction boxes, and electrical sub-panels typically required to install batteries to a “wall of spaghetti” on a home.
“If you think about one crew having to take three to four days to install a battery system with a traditional transfer switch or system controller or gateway, versus a crew that can now do multiple installations in one day with a Backup Switch and Powerwall 3, it’s much more scalable,” he said. That means getting “more clean energy installed faster, which is what we’re all looking for.”
But for meter socket adapters to put a real dent in soft costs, more utilities will have to let installers use them — and getting utilities comfortable with third-party devices that plug into their meters has been a long slog.
Whit Fulton, CEO of ConnectDER, knows just how long it has taken. He launched his meter-socket-adapter company in 2011, and won his first utility project in 2015 with Green Mountain Power, which is in the vanguard in deploying solar-charged batteries in households. Similar utility-led projects have followed in Arizona, Hawaii, and New York.
But it wasn’t until more recently that ConnectDER has been able to supply a meter socket adapter for use by solar and battery installers. “It’s been a crawl-walk-run approach,” Fulton said, driven as much by policymaker pressure as by utility acceptance.
One big win came in 2021, when Colorado state lawmakers passed a law that required utility Xcel Energy to allow customers to use meter socket adapters to connect solar systems. “Xcel adopted it, and it worked pretty well,” he said. “From there, we were off to the races,” with utilities in 25 states serving a collective 30 million households now allowing some use of ConnectDER’s meter socket adapter designed for installation with home solar systems.
A separate ConnectDER meter socket adapter designed for installation with EV chargers has also been approved for use by 21 utilities in 14 states, he said.
This summer, ConnectDER launched its latest product, dubbed IslandDER, built specifically to simplify whole-home battery backup systems that are an increasingly common add-on for homes installing solar or looking for alternatives to fossil-fueled generators, Fulton noted. IslandDER is being used by partners including Lunar Energy, FranklinWH, SolarEdge, and EcoFlow, with test installations in 12 states and larger-scale deployments expected next year, he said.
Getting approvals for these devices is not easy. Utilities are cautious by nature. For Tesla to notch its dozens of approvals, Hastings said it took years and “hundreds, if not thousands, of meetings.”
At the same time, California regulators helped push utilities to accept meter socket adapters with a decision this summer that “created a regulatory framework by which the utilities have to review products like these, and create an avenue for approval,” said Kyle Breuning, director of applications and fleet analytics for Lunar Energy, a home-battery and energy-controls startup.
Ultimately, Hastings would like Tesla’s Backup Switch to be an option for installers across the country. Right now, only about 40% of the projects installed today that could use a Backup Switch are allowed to do so, she said.
“It’s safe, it’s reliable, it’s field-tested. It has gone through extensive processes with many utilities,” she said. “I can’t think of any good reason not to approve it.”
A correction was made on Dec. 22, 2025: This story originally misstated Kyle Breuning’s title. He is now director of application and fleet analytics for Lunar Energy, not senior manager of applications engineering.
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