Are you dealing with frequently flickering lights? Do your circuit breakers trip often when you turn on large appliances? Does your home have several two-pronged outlets that do not accommodate today’s three-pronged plugs for most electrical appliances? If you answered yes to any of these questions, your home more than likely needs a heavy up, which is an increase in the power of your main electrical service. For example, we can transition your home from lower amperage to either 200 or 400 amps.

Homes without Ground Fault Interrupter (GFI) outlets in the bathrooms, kitchens, or garages also need to be upgraded. This is a type of outlet that protects against electrical shocks. GFI outlets are required in most states, and homeowners in MD, VA, and DC should change all older version outlets to GFI outlets. A GFI outlet has two buttons, including a test button and a reset button, and the outlets turns the power off before a shock can occur. It is especially important that GFI outlets are installed in any area of your home where water flows—bathrooms, kitchens, outdoor areas. The outlet will sense when there is a potentially dangerous imbalance in the flow of electricity from the outlet to whatever is plugged and will shut off to prevent shocks or electrocution.

Many older homes in the area were constructed with aluminum wiring. When these homes were built, aluminum wiring was considered safe to use and viewed as a cost-saving measure. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) now believes aluminum wiring poses a safety hazard in homes that still have this type of wiring.

The biggest danger associated with aluminum wiring is that unanticipated fire hazards arise from the rusting and deterioration caused at the points where aluminum wiring is connected at outlets, light fixtures, and splices. Call us so an expert electrician can evaluate whether or not this is a problem in your home and take steps to transition your home from aluminum to copper wiring.

If you live in an older MD, VA, or DC home, contact Kolb Electric today. We strongly recommend that you avoid attempting any electrical upgrades or repairs on your own as this can be very dangerous. Electrical upgrades are best left to a professional, licensed electrician.

Any building, in any industry, in any area of the world, is susceptible to having potentially hazardous and radioactive exit signs installed throughout their building.

This could mean they are in schools, near your office, or anywhere else where a radioactive setting probably isn’t a desired situation to be in.

This is why we thought it was necessary to create this post to help and guide you towards identifying, removing, and finally replacing your radioactive exit signs with new signs that are much safer and even efficient, saving you money over other alternatives.

Firstly before we can remove and replace these seemingly nuclear exit signs, you have to be able to identify if you have them or not. But before that, lets explain what exactly makes these exit signs radioactive.

How are some exit signs radioactive?

Just the same way as some exit signs are safe, it is all in the way they are built. For some reason, whether it be technology of the time or something else, people assumed it was a good idea to create exit signs with Tritium, also known as 3H or H-3. Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, causing exit signs made with this to be radioactive by default. The only seemingly positive upside to these exit signs is that they are non-electrical, meaning they won’t rack up anything in electricity bills.

But before you become alarmed with what we have shared with you so far, tritium emits only a low-energy beta radiation, which in turn causes the sealed glass tube it is in to glow (causing the exit sign to give off the illumination it requires). Thankfully, it is rather well known that this type of radiation can hardly (if at all) penetrate a piece of paper or clothing. So while yes it is a very low level (energy wise) type of radiation, the fact that there are alternatives that will remove radiation entirely from your building is all the reason to uninstall your tritium exit signs and replace them with something more safe, like LED exit signs.

Now that you understand the technology and how tritium in exit signs work a little bit more, let’s go over how exactly you can identify whether or not you have these types of exit signs in your building.

Identifying a radioactive exit sign should be fairly easy. All of these signs are required to have some sort of “Caution of Radioactive Material” warning on the fixture.

If you do find such a warning label, it is safe to say your light is made of tritium. Another tell-tale sign is whether or not your signs are connected to an electrical source or not as tritium signs do not require any such connection.

Once you’ve identified if you have a tritium exit sign or not, if you do happen to have one, you may continue on to removing and replacing it with the alternative exit sign, LED.

As with any lighting fixture, we recommend to bring in a professional contractor to do the job. But as a general guideline, you can typically recycle your tritium signs by returning them to the manufacturer or place of purchase.

If you purchased the building with them pre-installed and are unsure of where they came from after inspection of the signs for any brand markings, you can try two things:

1: Try contacting the previous building owner or collect records of where they were manufactured

2: Recycle them with a third party. like these), buying them, then installing them yourself or with a professional (we recommend a professional).

Here are a few things you should remember and keep in mind when dealing with a building that has radioactive exit signs:

Are your customers getting hot under the collar about rising energy costs? If so, suggest they buy a ceiling fan.

Although ceiling fans do consume electricity, experts say the amount of money homeowners can save on air conditioning greatly outweighs the cost of running the fan itself.

“Ceiling fans provide year-round comfort and efficiency,” says Barb Wright, a ceiling fan product manager at Westinghouse Lighting.

Wright says the cost of operating a ceiling fan varies based on how often they’re turned on and how much the electric company charges, but on average, she says a standard ceiling fan costs less to operate than an incandescent light bulb.

Experts say ceiling fans reduce energy in two ways.

First, fans circulate the air in the room, preventing hot air from accumulating at the ceiling.

“A ceiling fan helps equalize the temperature throughout the room, so your air conditioner doesn’t have to work as hard to keep the room cool,” says Scot Wetmore, marketing director at Dan’s Fan City, a ceiling fan retailer with more than 50 stores in the United States.

When people are in the room, Wetmore says ceiling fans have the added benefit of making people feel cooler.

“Ceiling fans cool by evaporation, like a wind chill factor,” he says, adding that fans will make it feel like it’s about 6 degrees cooler in your home than it actually is, allowing you to set your thermostat 6 degrees higher. According to Progress Energy, an energy company that services North and South Carolina and Florida, homeowners can save 7 to 10 percent off their cooling costs for each degree above 78.

And ceiling fans don’t just save money in the summer. Ceiling fans run counterclockwise in the summer, but many ceiling fans are equipped with reverse switches which allow you to run the fan clockwise in the winter, thereby reducing heating bills, too.

“[Changing the direction of the fan] makes the air column go up toward the ceiling, and what it does is it drives air currents up on the ceiling to the wall and down the wall, and that helps redistribute heat from the ceiling. So it helps lower your heating bills by re-circulating the heat,” Wetmore explains.

If a ceiling fan also includes a light fixture, Wright says customers can maximize their energy savings by replacing the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

Wright says homeowners should also consider buying Energy Star-rated ceiling fans. “They are about 50 percent more efficient than conventional fan/light units with an estimated energy savings of $15 to $20 per year,” Wright says.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star Web site, Energy Star-rated ceiling fans move air up to 20 percent more efficiently than conventional models due to advanced blade and motor design, and Energy Star-rated ceiling fans that have light fixtures are about 50 percent more efficient and produce about 75 percent less heat.

Several ceiling fan manufacturers make ceiling fans that meet the government’s Energy Star requirements, including Casablanca, Kichler, Minka Aire and Savoy House.

Click here to shop hundreds of decorative and functional ceiling fans at Capitol Lighting’s 1800lighting.com and start saving on energy today!

The secret of creating a great home entertainment system is designing a layout that fits into your home while keeping hidden as much of the understructure (i.e. the wiring) as possible. To achieve this, some homeowners hire professional electricians to send wires through the walls and ceiling. But people often take on the work as a do-it-yourself hobby. Although this is a much better DIY project than, say, attempting to install a furnace or an air conditioning system on your own (you should never try either), it can sometimes lead to wiring issues that are difficult to diagnose and fix. When problems crop up, it’s best to call in an electrician with knowledge of home entertainment systems to assist you.