Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

Clean energy fascinates me. I thought I knew quite a bit about it, but boy was I wrong. The bulk of my knowledge was about the three main sources of clean energy: wind, solar, and hydro energy. But last night, I discovered that I had a lot more to learn, even about those three familiar types.

If you’ve been following business headlines (or your 401K’s monthly statements), you’ve likely heard about a lot of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures at some of the biggest tech companies. After flying high during the pandemic, when many of us were living significant parts of our lives online, these firms are finding they might have been overly optimistic that the growth would continue once Covid’s worst days had passed.

Like companies in pretty much all the building trades these days, electrical contracting firms are becoming increasingly stretched when it comes to getting the staffing numbers in line with their needs.

It truly amazes me how LEDs have transformed the lighting industry in just a decade. In 2012, manufacturers introduced the first bulbs to match the output of a standard 60W incandescent. They weren’t dimmable and could cost $25 or more. Fast forward to 2023, and LEDs now dominate the lighting market, and inexpensive replacement lamps can cost less than $5 and last 10-20 years.

With winter now in force, the snow shovel and bag of ice-melting pellets have returned like migrating songbirds to their seasonal perches on my back deck. I live in a part of southeast New England that doesn’t get a lot of snow, on average, but is also quite capable of getting buried if a nor’easter follows just the right track up the coast.

There have been many times when I was elbows deep in a wiring trough or raceway. We sometimes called the smaller units gutters, but all were raceways and wiring troughs.