Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

I'm not a spring chicken by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm not technology challenged, either. Fired up my first computer in the '80s, and I've had a love affair with tech ever since. Don't tell my wife, okay?

Seriously though, I do like my tech and use it to make life easier for me. I have high-speed internet in the 1 gigabyte range, flying over fiber optics supplied by my electric company.

You can call me a crazy old coot. That's okay… my kids do. But when I say that water and electricity mix, I mean it. Often with either explosive or shocking results.

Oil and water? Yes, they like to keep separated. But H2O and moving electrons love to party. And they're always looking for a chance to hook up and dance.

There’s a lot of electrical work that goes on in our ceilings. Light fixtures, fans, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors – all of these devices often find a home above our heads. The trick for electrical contractors can lie in how to mount these products, given the broad array of ceiling conditions they can encounter.

When it comes to electrical covers, you have decisions to make. Really, some of them are made for you. Of course, when choosing indoor covers, it's mostly color, number of devices installed, types of devices installed, and device configuration.

Lighting impacts virtually every aspect of a building, and as a result, contractors are always looking for solutions that make lighting control easier to estimate, faster to install, and more profitable.

Off-grid lighting products were once restricted to truly off-grid locations. Old-school lead-acid batteries needed regular maintenance and the added costs made these fixtures only practical where wiring simply wasn’t possible, in applications like remote cell towers or other such locations. That’s changing quickly, though. New all-in-one options combine high-efficiency LED fixtures with attached solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, creating affordable new possibilities for wires-free area lighting installations, even in dense urban locations.