Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

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.

Grounding is a critical safety component in any electrical system. It provides a safe pathway for excess electrical current that arises through a short circuit or surge event to travel to the earth. Otherwise, that current could end up electrifying adjacent surfaces, creating an obvious safety hazard.

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.

As someone who’s been writing about LED lighting for almost a decade, I’ve gotten used to the terms “color temperature” and “light output,” and I now have a reasonably good idea about what to look for when shopping for my own lamps (aka, “bulbs”) and fixtures. But I still, on occasion, either realize I’ve chose the wrong lamp for a fixture or wish I could move between two color temperatures with the same luminaire.