In one of our recent blog articles, we discussed Indoor Electrical Safety and the areas of your home you should be aware of in order to prevent a fire or potential injury.

In this article, we will be going over Outdoor Electrical Safety – safety measures that are just as important if not more important than indoor electrical safety measures. Being outdoors, your devices, tools, or cords are exposed to temperature change, weathering and tampering that could reduce the safety and security of your home.

Review and follow these basic safety rules when using electricity outdoors. If your outdoor activities do not abide by the safety guidelines discussed, consult an electrician and immediately resolve the issue.

Safety Rules:

For more indoor or outdoor safety rules and guidelines, contact Expert Electric. 604-681-8338.

Department of Energy. In the summer, keep your thermostat at a minimum of 78°F—no higher. And in the winter, try 68°F.

Most people are actually perfectly comfortable at this temperature—more so than they may think. When elderly relatives or small children live in the home, these settings may not be possible, but they can help most people save money while they are home.

Here is one of the most common misconceptions about heating and air conditioning systems: turning down the temperature all the way will help the home cool off faster, and turning the heat up as high as possible warms a home faster. This simply isn’t the case.

With time, lower temperatures will make the house colder, but it won’t happen any faster. Your air conditioner runs nonstop to reach the setting on the temperature, which is less than what you need to be comfortable. Then, you end up paying way more than you should, and you may not really be comfortable.

The same is true when you continuously get up to adjust the thermostat settings. The AC/heater simply becomes overworked, and this is something you want to avoid. Use your programmable thermostat to keep temperatures stable instead.

When you leave the home, it’s important to use the programming settings on your thermostat to keep temperatures about 10° lower (in the winter) or higher (when it’s hot outside). This way, you don’t waste energy cooling or heating a home that is unoccupied.

However, you don’t want to change the temperature by too much. Let’s say it’s summer and you are away for the day. You shut off the AC completely and turn it on when it gets home. Now, the air conditioner has to work hard to get back up to speed, which may use up even more energy than keeping it at a higher temperature for the day.

Many people are unsure of how to effectively use their thermostats for energy efficiency. Get to know your thermostat by spending some time reading the thermostat. You may be able to use programming options to set different schedules on weekends and weekdays, or to make changes throughout the day.

If your thermostat is over 10 years old, it may be time for a new one. New smart thermostats allow you to set schedules or make changes directly from your smartphone. Ask a local technician about your options.

The jargon in the lighting world can often get mixed up. Color rending index (CRI) and color temperature are one of the most to be confused with each other. This post is going to clarify what the different between CRI and Color Temperature is so we can end this confusion.

Here is a short explanation why the CRI is more important to focus on before deciding for a color temperature. The color rendering index is the most important feature in certain applications as it determines the appearance of objects, faces and spaces. If this aspect is not relevant, the CRI can be as low as 60 or even 40.

The color rendering index (CRI) is a numeric evaluation of the light color accuracy with the reference of daylight (numbered 100). Sunlight and its broad spectrum will enable a person with normal vision to see 68 different colors in a color chart, but if the chart is illuminated by a light source of one wavelength only, each color from the color chart will appear as a different brightness of that one color. Some activities, such as walking or operating a vehicle, do not require the accurate perception of surface colors while others such as product selections in shops benefit from better color rendering features. Look at the application of the lighting installation. If the visual tasks are easy to perform the CRI doesn’t need to be high. In areas like offices, handcraft manufacturing and surgery, the requirements for visibility, contrast, visual guidance as well as face recognition need to be provided by a lighting system with a good CRI of >80 or even >90.

How much is the light color affecting the space? The term color temperature describes the temperature of objects by which they emit light, modeled through the “blackbody radiator”. When increasing the temperature of a “blackbody”, it starts to emit visible light in a continuous spectrum. The filament of a 60W incandescent lamp heats up to about 3000°F, as a result the lamp emits light with a color temperature of 3000K. Many of our artificial light sources do not create light by heating up a material until it glows like an incandescent lamps. Instead of creating a continuous spectrum, they generate an assortment of color emission lines. A blackbody color temperature cannot be directly given to this non-blackbody type of emission, generated by high intensity discharge and fluorescent lamps for example. For those light sources, a correlated color temperature (CCT) is indicated, based on the blackbody color temperature. A cool white fluorescent lamp has a CCT of about 5000K. The lamps light spectrum is different from a blackbody one but has the same temperature.

The light color influences the atmosphere in a space. The more cozy the ambiance the warmer the light color (lower color temperature) should be and the more dynamic the scene the cooler the light source (higher color temperature). The CRI is the most important factor to watch when choosing light sources. How good is the light source representing faces, colors and contrasts? The easier the visual task and perception the lower the CRI can be. The color temperature needs to be watched second, it is supporting the space’s atmosphere.

Conclusion

There you have it; an explanation of both the Color Rending Index and Color Temperature.

Have anymore questions or thoughts? Comment them down below!

One of the most common electrical problems that faces homeowners is dead outlets. It doesn't matter if you live in an ancient home or your property was just built last year, dead outlets happen in almost every house and for a number of reasons.

Usually, an outlet will go out because the breaker or fuse that it is affiliated with it has been blown. Generally, this will occur because too much pressure is being put on the outlet for the power source to handle. The cause is usually a large appliance plugged in, like an air conditioner that is either an older model, meaning it probably uses extra electricity, or that is sharing the plug with another high-wattage appliance.

You'll need to go to either your fuse or breaker box to fix this problem. If your home uses breakers, flip the switch that corresponds with the outlet in question firmly into the off position, making sure it completely falls in place. Your breakers should be labeled, so identifying which one to switch should be relatively easy.

If you have a fuse box, make sure that your replacement fuse has the same wattage as the one that blew before twisting it into place.