Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

Controlling commercial outdoor lighting isn’t only important for energy efficiency, it’s also important for human and animal health. Excessive outdoor lighting can affect sleeping patterns, impact bird migration and deprive all of us of views of the nighttime sky.

Correlated color temperature (CCT) has become a hot topic in commercial outdoor lighting, as many have argued LED-based fixtures are just too, well, cool. In part, this is because this newer technology produces a different kind of light than the high-pressure sodium and metal halide fixtures we all became accustomed to during those technologies’ decades of outdoor use.

There are great products that make a contractor's life easier as far as fan and fixture placement is concerned. Whether you're doing new construction or retrofit "old work," there are box options that make installs easier.

And some of them keep the drywall guys from messing with you.

With Lutron flexible, wireless lighting control solutions you can rapidly reconfigure existing spaces to promote social distancing, help reduce the number of things employees and visitors have to touch during the day and install up to 70% faster than a wired solution.

Electrical fittings are everywhere in home and business distribution systems – so much so, you might think they’re all interchangeable. But for contractors working in multiple indoor and outdoor locations, that’s not the case. Not all connectors or other fittings offer the same level of protection for the cabling running through them, which is why matching this hardware to its specific applications is so important.

If you're a J.R.R. Tolkien fan, you recognized that headline reference. Or if you're a movie buff and watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you're familiar with the little jar of liquid that lit up when you talked to it.

But in any case, if you're an electrician, you've been in dark places because of power outages or new construction.

I've been in my share of them, for sure.