TL;DR
A critical loads panel is a subpanel that gathers the circuits a household cannot do without, refrigerator, well pump, furnace blower, some lights and outlets, so a battery or generator backs up only those during an outage. Sizing the backup source to a curated panel instead of the whole house cuts system cost dramatically and stretches battery runtime.
What it means
A critical loads panel is a subpanel that gathers the circuits a household cannot do without, refrigerator, well pump, furnace blower, some lights and outlets, so a battery or generator backs up only those during an outage. Sizing the backup source to a curated panel instead of the whole house cuts system cost dramatically and stretches battery runtime. During a solar-plus-storage install, deciding which circuits move into it is one of the few choices the homeowner truly has to make, and rewiring circuits into it later costs more than choosing well the first time.
Where it sits in the glossary
Critical loads panel is part of the Trade jargon group inside the ProFix Directory glossary. Browse every term in this category from the glossary index.
Why Ohio homeowners should know it
This is a term Ohio homeowners encounter when reading contractor quotes, hiring paperwork, or inspection reports. Understanding it well enough to ask one good follow-up question is usually all the protection a homeowner needs.
ProFix Directory keeps definitions short on the index page and saves the longer context — Ohio-specific rules, where the term comes from, and which ProFix tools touch it — for these per-term pages so the term is easy to cite and easy to share.
ProFix tools that touch this term
See also
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