Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

Yeah, I’m sure you know the saying — “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And I’d imagine you probably chuckled, just a little anyway. A friend of mine gave his small boy a hammer for his birthday. And the kid beat on everything, all day long, when Tommy was at work… including the gas meter in the yard.

Up until three years ago, I lived with a couple small boxes of spare fuses that sat on top of the water heater in the basement, ready to be drawn from should the rare combination of, say, the toaster and microwave operating at the same time happen to shut down power to the kitchen.

As you know intimately, conduits are tubing systems that safeguard and guide wiring within a building or structure. Three types you've likely used —Intermediate Metal Conduit (IMC), Rigid Metal Conduit (RMC), and Electrical Metallic Tubing (EMT)— are steel-based conduits, each with its unique attributes.

Recently, my wife and I had the “pleasure” of visiting a relatively new hospital complex. For almost a year, I watched the 5-story edifice being built as I traveled up and down Highway 49 in Northwest Arkansas.

Rooftop solar panels, once a bit of an oddity, are becoming a common addition to homes across the United States. In 2020, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s residential energy consumption survey found that almost 4% of U.S. single-family homes were using panels to generate electricity and the market has continued to grow since then, with capacity climbing by 34% in 2021 and an additional 40% in 2022.

There it is again! That cat’s chasing rabbits in my garden again tonight. I knew something was tearing things up in there at night, so I installed a set of solar powered floods on the top of the gate.