Summers in Virginia are always filled with community activities and backyard parties. As the days get warmer, more time is spent outdoors and hanging out with close friends and family. Most of these gatherings last well into the nighttime with the desire to stay outside for as long as possible. If you have ever hosted a gathering like this, then you know that most of it is spent in your backyard. If you don’t have the right backyard accessories to host a gathering, check out these tips that can help transform your backyard into a party worthy space!

Lighting

Outdoor lighting is the most important feature for any backyard gathering. It gives a certain aesthetic and helps illuminate your yard so your gathering can last all night. You can grab a few old mason jars that are just lying around and place some tissue paper and battery-operated flameless candles in them for an effortless centerpiece lighting on your tables. Don’t forget to light a few citronella candles throughout your backyard to fight off those pesky mosquitoes.

Hurricane Sandy is making her presence known in MD, DC, and VA. Downed trees, flooding, and even snowfall are causing serious problems for people in the area. Millions are without power throughout the Northeast. Hurricane Sandy is not the first, nor will it be the last, powerful storm to hit the area. This is a perfect time to consider investing in a home or commercial standby backup generator, which is a permanently installed fixture.

Kolb Electric is a leading installer of home standby backup generators. This type of generator is permanently installed on a gravel bed or concrete pad next to your house. The benefits of investing in a home standby backup generator include:

Here at Kolb Electric, we’ve also completed numerous commercial standby backup generators. We’ve heard the same thing over and over again from business owners in the area in terms of what they’re looking for in a backup generator:

Standby backup generators allow homes and businesses to continue normal, everyday operations. Hurricane Sandy is a real wakeup call to MD, DC, and VA that the area is vulnerable to inclement weather conditions. To protect your home or business from future power outages, contact Kolb Electric to schedule a home or commercial standby backup generator installation.

How many light bulbs have you changed in your lifetime? It’s a simple action, and often one that we don’t put much thought into, but what if the simple act of changing a light bulb could make a profound impact on the environment, and the well-being of future generations?  As experienced www.EnergyStar.gov:

“If every American home replaced just one light bulb with a light bulb that’s earned the ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light 3 million homes for a year, save about $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent 9 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year, equivalent to those from about 800,000 cars.”

Think about the changes that you can make by simply replacing the outdated incandescent bulbs in your home as they burn out with one of the Alternative Lighting Solutions below. Here are some details on a couple of the most popular Alternative Lighting Solutions available.

Compact Fluorescent Lamp: Modern CFL bulbs for use in homes consist of a curved fluorescent tube and electronic ballast in a single unit, designed as a direct replacement for standard blubs. They use 3-4 times less power than comparable incandescent bulbs. These are great options to replace your standard light bulbs, but they do have a few small drawbacks. According to an article by PopularMechanics.com, while CFL’s do have a much longer lifespan than standard bulbs, they often lose some of their brightness long before their expected lifespan is up, and this is increased in fixtures that don’t allow for efficient cooling of the ballast located in the base of the bulb. Another documented fact about CFL bulbs is that they do contain mercury, which means that they must be disposed of properly by taking them your local approved recycling center. You wouldn’t throw a battery out with the daily trash would you? So you shouldn’t throw these out either.

Light Emitting Diodes: LED’s are a form of “solid state” lighting that have become available recently to homeowners as an incandescent and CFL replacement. Using small light emitting diodes mounted directly to circuit boards, these are highly efficient, and have fewer parts prone to failure, allowing for an expected realistic lifespan of 20,000 to 30,000 hours, when operated at recommended temperatures. While initial costs for these bulbs are higher than incandescent and CFL options, long term energy savings are where this alternative lighting option truly shines, with the average LED bulb using approximately 12-17% of the energy that it takes to run an incandescent bulb of similar output, the end result is a bulb that costs drastically less to power over time.

As a point of comparison, here is a simple chart of the energy usage of LED and CFL bulbs compared to incandescent bulbs, and the output associated with them:

Lighting technology has changed a lot in the past decade, and it is pretty amazing to see what could be on the horizon for future lighting innovations. Take this for example. While most homes will never need this amount of output, it’s pretty impressive to see that something the size of a Christmas tree light, like this plasma bulb, can put out more light, more efficiently, than the giant bulbs that we use in street lamps!

The great thing about these changes is that they aren’t something that requires a huge change in your lifestyle, so they are some of the easiest ways possible to help the environment, and lower electric bills while you are at it!

About ElectricMan Inc.

You hear a lot of suggestions and general chatter about making the change from traditional incandescent bulbs to LED. And while we at Kolb Electric generally agree, we noticed something when hopping around on the web. You can find a lot of answers why this is a good idea. But none of it is really…simple. You get charts, math, and massive walls of text, and you know that deep down, somewhere in there lies your answer. If only you could get your eyes to stop glazing over. So we decided to lay it down layman style for our consumers, letting you know the why in a short, succinct bit of information!

There are a few aspects that overall make LED the superior option. Longevity is good, as these lights tend to last much longer, thus need to be purchased less often. They’re also environmentally friendly, and that’s nice too. But when it comes down to it, you care about the efficiency. And this lies in the wattage of the two lighting types.

Light wattage strictly refers to how much energy a light requires to generate lumens (the unit we use to measure light). The big secret between these two light sources lies all in how they generate lumens:

To make it clear, let’s use an example: A standard incandescent bulb generally uses 60 watts of power to generate light. You can get the same amount of light from an LED, for a mere six to eight watts.

So there’s the big answer. The average light wattage of an LED is more desirable, since it requires demonstrably less energy to produce light. The longevity and environmental-friendliness are basically the icing on the technological cake!