‘Tis the season to be jolly with thousands of colorful lights glowing from your trees, gutters, front door wreath, and bushes. Billions of lights will be used to dress up homes and businesses throughout the country during the final months of the year. As festive as the light-up Santa and Rudolph may look on top of your roof, you have to make electrical safety the focus of your holiday lighting festivities.

Following are five tips to help you avoid common holiday lighting problems others will experience this year. Commit them to memory so electrical safety does not pull the plug on your merry-making décor this year:

1. If you are putting up a live Christmas tree, make sure it is well-watered and use LED bulbs for all decorations placed on the tree. Dry trees and heat from non-LED bulbs create home fires every holiday season. Do not place candles where they may be knocked over on a live tree. LED bulbs should be used when decorating trees in your outdoor landscape as well.

2. Thoroughly inspect every string of lights and plug-in points before using them indoors or outdoors. If you notice any of the following at even one point on the string, toss it out or repair the damage before use to ensure electrical safety for your home:

3. Power cords should be used to connect strings of lights, but pay attention to how many strings you are connecting per cord. In general, more than three strings of lights could be too much.

4. Avoid hanging your lights with tacks, screws, or nails. You do not want to crack, tear, or otherwise damage the electric cord. You can use insulated hooks instead.

5. Make sure you are plugging outdoor lighting features into ground fault circuit interrupter outlets. These outlets reduce the risk of electrical shorts or dangerous shocks if water, wet leaves, and other outdoor elements get into the sockets.

6. Do not use indoor-only holiday lights outdoors. There are clear differences in how these types of lights are made, even if they look the same. For instance, outdoor lights are created with more insulation so they are not as easily affected by rain and snow.

Do not allow electrical safety to cut the cord on your holiday lighting festivities. Light up the house and allow the big snowman to wave at the neighbors from your front lawn. Just make sure your snow globes, trains, and twinkling tree lights present no danger to your home, your family, and your neighborhood.

Image via CleanTechnica.com

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Have you made any lighting changes to your home or building this month? Or have you learned anything new about light? Please share!

LED Tubes and LED Panels become the best solution for the office workplace environment. They are cost effective lighting solutions, provide good lighting quality, last longer and contain or emit no harmful compounds while leaving an ecological footprint in each building. This article is going to explain the difference between tube fixtures and panel fixtures. They are both different, but often times get mixed up when talked about. Let’s clarify any confusions you may have about the two fixtures…

LED Panels are installed in dropped paneled ceilings. perfect replacement for expensive shatterproof fluorescent lamps. MyLEDLightingGuide LED tubes do not contain glass and will not shatter if dropped. Fluorescent tubes contain mercury, some projects decide for LED versions because they want to remove mercury out of the building.

All LED tubes use drivers that power the LEDs. The ballast is converting the AC power from the utility company into LED’s DC power. Some manufacturers incorporate the drivers in the LED tubes. Some decide to use an external driver outside of the tube. There are some subtle differences between the two designs. Retrofitting to LED tubes with internal drivers involves removing the ballast and rewiring the line source. Retrofitting external driver tubes involves removing the ballast, the line source gets wired to the external LED driver that is connected to the tubes. More and more people ask for LED tubes that can be just installed as a plug and play version into existing fixtures without removing or rewiring the existing ballast. While the installation of these tubes is simple, they are compatible with most ballast, but not all ballasts. Contact the lighting experts at MyLEDLightingGuide.com to ensure the tubes will run properly.

Changing the light at work and in offices is easily done by LED tubes. They are readily set up and use considerably less power. LED tube light sources offer smooth, stable and clear lighting conditions.