A Tiffany lamp is a style of fixture commonly associated with the Art Nouveau movement. The term is sometimes used broadly to refer to stained glass but it gets its name from the original creator and design director, Louis Comfort Tiffany – the son of Tiffany & Co. founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany.

The first Tiffany lamp was produced around 1895. In line with Tiffany’s vision that nature should inspire design, each piece featured elements of nature or geometric shapes to create intricate patterns. Each lamp was handmade by Louis himself or by an artist in his studio.

The bases of the lamps were typically sculpted from bronze with shades created from hundreds of cut glass shapes fashioned together with copper foil. These works of art took many hours of skilled craftsmanship to complete and remain popular to this day, thanks to their complex beauty.

When you flick on the light switch, what happens? If you’re thinking “the room lights up… hopefully,” then you’re probably missing out on an opportunity for breathtaking lighting to do so much more than just let you see in the dark.

Your home should look intentional and deliberate, not just functional. Lighting is one of the best, easiest, and most easily ignored ways to make your home go from “nice place,” to “oh wow.” Seriously! Think back to the first time you saw under-cabinet lighting, for instance. Wow, talk about a way to get the most out of a space, while still showing off the best aspects out of the kitchen. That is exactly the effect that an inspired electrician can create, simply by optimizing your layout to handle some really nifty things with lighting. Even if you don’t decide to pull the trigger on the uplighting for your soon-to-come artwork, having the ability to add that in with little effort later thanks to a box hidden in the wall (just in case) takes almost no effort on our part, but can make a tremendous difference in your home’s perception, and value, down the road.

Light doesn’t just shine from one direction. Even sunlight is seen in the form of reflection, direct contact, and general ambient lighting. These simple principles are the same that should be used and recreated in your home. Your home should mirror that breathtaking view you saw on your favorite vacation, when the sunlight shone just so; conjure up that image, then imagine the architecture of your home and how it could be better illuminated. If you’re drawing a blank, don’t worry, that’s what our experienced electricians are here for. We’ll happily handle the up lighting, room lighting, and ambient lighting to create the effect that you’re looking for, even if you don’t really know how to explain it or where the circuits need to run. While all of this sounds expensive, creating a couple of extra lighting lines is simple when you’re already committing to work on your home, but becomes much more difficult later; always take advantage of the opportunity to bring an electrician and find out what is possible – 9 times out of 10, we find that homeowners who do this thank themselves for it later.

One of the biggest mistakes that builders and general contractors make is doing the bare minimum for lighting, leaving the home with nothing but a few can lights either dimly lighting the room or blinding everyone inside. Don’t let your lights let you down, or you’ll find that all your painting and furniture efforts just seem to fall flat of that wow factor you’re looking for.

Contact Electrical Gurus in Des Moines for the inspired, experienced service you need to create artistically inspired lighting for your home. When done right, you’ll find an incredible amount of value in a couple of lighting changes.

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This issue almost exclusively applies to instructions on how to safely repair it.

The average rated life of a light bulb represents how long it took for half of the bulbs to fail during testing (given perfect conditions). If your bulb lasted 12,315 hours (you counted!) but the label touted an average rated of life of 20,000 hours, you’re actually still within range of an acceptable life span.

We measure LED bulbs a bit differently since they never technically burn out, but rather fade over time. Instead, the Lighting FactsTM label indicates LED lumen maintenance (LM), which is an estimate of the bulb’s lumen depreciation over a given time.

Solution: Understand that the expected lifespan of your light bulb is simply an estimate based on testing that was performed in a controlled environment. When a bulb burns out earlier than that estimate, it doesn’t always mean something is wrong with it.

Bryant Electric Service was recently inundated with calls the morning after a strong wind/thunderstorm blew through Austin.  This happens every time.  Although many calls were customers needing their power restored after tree limbs took down their overhead power line, there were also many calls wanting our service techs to come out to check their whole electrical system because of nearby lightning strikes damaging many of their home appliances and electronic devices.

With the enormous amount of electronics that are now being installed in almost every device that can be plugged into any power or phone/data outlet, it has become evident that having whole house power/data surge protection installed is imperative.

When lightning strikes it creates a huge static electrical field that, like the bolt itself, seeks the easiest path of least resistance to the ground.  The easiest path for this static current is your overhead electrical and phone/cable lines that run up and down your street and all of which connect directly to your house.  When this happens, it destroys the very delicate, low voltage instruments that are now installed in most appliances:  refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, oven, coffee makers, washer/dryer, A/C and furnace, thermostat, garage door opener, sprinkler system control, etc.  These are all affected by power surges going throughout your electrical wiring system.  Then there are your TVs, computers, modem, hand-held charging devices, VCR, TV signal box, Bluetooth and your telephone, if you still have one, and these are all affected by the power surge through your phone/data cables.

If you are interested in receiving a cost estimate to have this protection installed in your house, please contact us at Bryant Electric Service and one of our dispatchers will be happy to help you.