Landscape lighting can add beauty to your home as well as provide increased safety on your property.  Lighting design can be used to light pathways, highlight your homes architecture, and deter intruders.  When considering adding lighting to your landscaping, it is important to find the right balance of lighting.  Focus on adding lighting to main activity areas like driveways, entrances, pathways, dark areas around windows, and stairs and main focal points such as fountains, trees, or statues.  The following landscape lighting basics can help make the most of your lighting.

Up-lighting: Up-lighting is placing a light facing upward toward an object to illuminate it.  This works well for highlighting the focal points of your landscape or home.  Use it sparingly to highlight objects around your yard like statues, trees, flag poles, and fountains.

Down-lighting: Down-lighting is used to illuminate large areas.  It works well for illuminating entertainment areas such as a patio or a deck.  It also helps to deter intruders.

Accent Lighting: Accent lighting is an excellent choice for lighting paths and stairs by placing lights along both edges of a path or a staircase.  This looks beautiful and has the added safety feature of helping prevent people from tripping and falling.  Accent lighting can also add focus to low-lying flowers, shrubs, and ponds.

Throughout the years, there has been an increase in popular trends to try out on homes. Many home improvement shows like Property Brothers, Fixer Upper and Love It or List It can give you inspiration to try and improve your own living space and try current trends that are hitting the market. These trends can increase the value of your home, save you money with utility bills and make your home more comfortable in general. In addition, updating your home every so often can help cut back on expensive maintenance costs because you are keeping up with your home’s appliances and hardware. Check out these home improvement trends that will benefit you and your home for years to come:

Kitchen Remodel

As a facility manager or building owner, it is nearly impossible to know everything about everything in your building. But it is vital to know something about everything, and that goes for your facilities lighting system too. Whether you manage a warehouse, factory, or other industrial sized building or space, the lighting is a huge factor of many things including safety, productivity, and consistency in the work in your facility.

So while you don’t need to know every facility managers and building owners should know about there lighting system and how lighting can make all the difference in various amounts of ways.

1. Not all lights are created equal. This is an obvious one, not all lighting technologies are created the same and all output at different levels. Firstly you have lighting technologies that are less efficient than others. Such as metal halide and HPS which are 2-3 times less efficient than LED technology is. Then you also have efficiency based on a “product to product” basis. For example; while LED is the clear winner in efficiency over metal halide (and really any other lighting technology), one LED product from one company isn’t going to be the same as the next company’s LED product. This is where you really need to dig deep and find the company that offers the most efficient lighting products over all other companies.

Key takeaway? First, understand that LED is the most efficient in a general sense, but also understand that each company and product varies on its own personal efficiency and you should always do your homework before going with one LED product over another!

2. New lighting system upgrade costs can be reduced with rebates. This is only a true statement when you are buying commercially qualified lighting products that are DesignLights Consortium qualified. return on investment overtime by decreased energy costs associated with running your lights. Obviously this ROI period will vary depending on how long you run your lights per day on average, but especially in big facilities they almost always are used often and thus, provide a good and even quick payback period.

4. Create safer environments with a proper lighting system. With low quality light output, you create an unsafe environment that can cause various issues. Lighting fixtures that aren’t outputting the proper amount of light after a few years into there life is all caused reasoning to retrofit over fully replace.

An electrical circuit is the necessary pathway required to provide power to your appliances, gadgets and electronics. Each circuit is a closed loop system that is formed by wires, a power source, load, a switch and some sort of circuit protection. The electricity flows from the power source, into the circuit and ultimately into the object that it is plugged into. After the electricity has provided the necessary power to the device, it then flows back to the original electrical source, allowing the circuit to keep the electrical current flowing in a smooth manner. There are three different types of electrical circuits: the parallel circuit, the series circuit and the series-parallel circuit.

How Do They Work?

An electrician in Santa Monica installs an electrical panel that is then broken into several circuits that provide power to your home. Whenever you plug a device into an electrical outlet, or flip a switch, you are accessing electricity that is flowing through that particular circuit. By plugging in or flipping a switch, you are essentially completing the circuit. This allows power to flow freely from the positive terminal of the power source, through the wire, and back to the negative terminal. This allows us to provide on-demand electricity to our light bulbs, televisions, appliances and other electronics.

Types of Circuits

The simplest type of circuit is the series circuit, because it provides only one possible path for electrical current. If this circuit is broken at any point along this path, none of the devices on the circuit will work. A parallel circuit, on the other hand, contains more than one path for electrical current. If one of the paths is broken, electricity can still flow to other portions of the circuit. A series-parallel circuit combines these two circuit types. Some portions of the circuit are parallel, and some are attached in series. If one of the series circuits breaks, it will shut off power to anything in that circuit. If a parallel circuit breaks, all other parallel circuits will continue to function as normal.

As an electrician Santa Monica, The Electric Connection installs and maintains electrical circuits on a daily basis. For more information, or questions about our services, visit our main website at www.theelectricconnection.com.

When it comes to the safety of your family in your home, carbon monoxide is not something that should be taken lightly. As an odorless and colorless toxic gas, carbon monoxide is responsible for about 500 deaths and 15,000 emergency room visits in the United States each year. Carbon monoxide alarms have been known to save lives since they sound when the CO gas levels in a home are high. Installing a carbon monoxide detector in the right place can make all the difference when it comes to your safety.