We still have a lot of cold weather to come in the months ahead. We’re encouraging homeowners to schedule their annual heating service as soon as possible, if they haven’t already. It’s not too late, and this preventative maintenance service can help you, your family, and your budget in a few different ways.

This fall, one of the most important things you can do for your home is to get a heating system inspection. During an inspection, a technician will look for issues affecting the performance of your heater.

More importantly, they’ll look for anything that compromises your safety. That includes poor gas connections, faulty electrical wiring, improper ventilation, blocked vents, and a cracked heat exchanger. Carbon monoxide poisoning is a real threat when you own a fuel-burning heater, and it’s so important that you have technicians give you the okay to keep using the heat.

With a complete safety inspection, you don’t have to worry so much about your heating system breaking down suddenly in the middle of winter. If this is something that’s happened to you before (or even if it hasn’t), you know that this is something you really want to avoid.

Heating systems are most likely to break down when they’re working their hardest. Make things easier on yourself for the winter by scheduling heating maintenance ne in the fall.

When a heater gets a thorough tune-up, you can feel confident that the system is running smoothly. And that can mean greater efficiency. Your heating system is able to run smoothly with a cleaned out blower wheel, tightened electrical connections, and other adjustments your technician may make.

That translates to lower bills. And if you complete this service every year, no matter how old your heating equipment is, you can maintain high efficiency levels for years, as heaters that receive regular maintenance are more likely to last for a long time to come.

CFLs are those new, small fluorescent light bulbs that screw into most regular light fixtures. You can use them to replace regular (incandescent) bulbs to save money and electricity. As the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power gets over 60% of its electricity from fossil fuels, especially coal, any time you replace a regular incandescent bulb with a CFL, it’s one small step towards reducing fossil fuel use in L.A.

CFLs come in all different shapes, but basically they’re a fluorescent tube bent this way or that or twisted into a spiral. “CFL” stands for “Compact Fluorescent Lamp.” They’re more compact than the long fluorescent tubes of our childhoods. They’re lamps, which is electrician-speak for “light bulb.” Here’s why they’re green — they save 75% of the energy that traditional incandescents use.

Here’s why they save you money — they cost more than a regular incandescent, but last a lot longer — 13 times longer. So even though each CFL costs more per bulb (about $4 for a CFL), it will also save you about $4 in bulbs as you won’t have to replace it so often.

Your electric bill will show more significant savings. Lighting costs about $20 out of $100 monthly electric bill. Because CFLs use one-quarter of the electricity of a regular incandescent, if you replace all the bulbs in your house with CFLs, you’ll save about $15 each month on a $100 electric bill.

CFLs are green, but not blue. Many people don’t enjoy the eerie bluish light of the old-fashioned long fluorescent tubes. CFLs can create all different colors of light, including warm tones. A recent study by the magazine Popular Mechanics found that even when people didn’t know which type of bulb was involved, they preferred the light of the CFL over the light from incandescent bulbs. CFLs also don’t buzz as the long tubes did.

CFLs have one downside — they each contain a small amount of mercury, which is a toxin. If a bulb breaks, you’ll need to take care to clean every bit up and to not touch the pieces. You’ll need to recycle spent bulbs or dispose of them as you would paint or other hazardous waste. However, they’re so long lasting that this will come up on the order of years, rather than months.

OK so you have a basic understanding of CFLs, now what can you do that’s simple to save money and electricity? The next time you go to the store, pick up a four-pack of CFLs. Choose four incandescent lights in your home or business that you use often and replace the incandescent bulbs with your new CFLs. You’ll start saving on your electric bill and will decrease the burning of fossil fuels to power Los Angeles.

Click here for more tips on saving electricity.

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: