LED lighting is truly an upgrade.  Home owners and businesses alike can keep more of there hard earned money by simply changing from incandescent bulbs to energy efficient LED bulbs.  While the upfront cost of the LED lamps is substantially higher, the long term cost savings from the energy efficient LED lamps is more than worth the upgrade.

If you don’t have the budget to replace all your old incandescent lamps try replacing just the most heavily used ones.  Or lamps in hard to reach areas such as eves or above stairs.  Kitchens tend to be one of the areas in a home that have the lights on the longest.  And with most kitchens having recessed can lighting in them, kitchens are one of the easiest locations to upgrade to LED lighting.  There is a lot of quality LED lamps available on the market today.  With major companies such as Sylvania and Feit offering dimmable long lasting LED lamps.

Choosing the right LED lamps can be a complicated task if you don’t know what your looking for.  With LED lamp packaging displaying words like, lumens, wattage, and color spectrum, choosing the right lamps is overwhelming for some.

Wattage is how most people judge the amount of light they want for the particular fixture.  However, lumens is the true measurement of the amount of visible light LED lamp will give off.  A typical 60 watt incandescent lamps will give off around 520 lumens and last on average 2800 hours.  While a quality LED 12 watt lamp can give off around 800 lumens and last around 25,000 hours.  Some LED lamp manufactures have put on there packaging what wattage of incandescent lamp there LED lamp is designed to replace.  This helps to take some of the confusion out of choosing the right bulb.

The right color spectrum can make a huge difference in the way a room looks.  Color spectrum or as some people call it lamp temperature, is the color of the light the lamp gives off.  When LED lamps were first released they gave off a very cool or bluish color versus the more yellow or warm color of traditional incandescent lamps.  Now days LED lamp manufactures have a more perfected color that the lamps give off.  Often you will not be able to tell a difference between the color of an incandescent lamp and a quality warm white LED lamp.

You must also choose if you want to be able to dim your new LED lamp.  Dimmable LED lamps often cost more than non dimmable lamps, some as much as 40% more.  Dimmable led lamps give you the ability to choose how much lumens the lamp gives off via your wall mounted dimmer switch.  Dimming your LED lamps helps to reduce energy usage which saves you money on your power bill.  Using an approved dimmer for the LED lamp is a critical factor.  LED lamp manufactures and a list of approved dimmers for there product that can often be found in the directions or the manufactures website.

By now we all should know that switching from incandescent lamps to LED lamps can be a substantial savings.  But how much can you really save?  If you figured an average of 25 LED lamps per household and factored in average usage over 50,000 hours you would save around $6,700.00 in energy cost per home.  Add in the cost of time and maintenance to change the old incandescent lamps and the saving grows even bigger from there.

With businesses typically having more lights and increased hour usage switching to LED makes perfect sense.  With many power companies such as Mid American Energy offering rebates to help offset the cost of upgrading the LED.  A recent LED upgrade project we completed is Hoodz of Central Iowa.  The LED lighting helps reduce energy consumption, heat, and

maintenance cost. While they choose an ultra modern high efficient LED fixture for this project, often changing the existing lighting from commercial fluorescents to LED linear lamps can be an option as well.

Mid American Energy is even upgrading street lighting with LED.  They are starting to replace more than 100,000 Des Moines area street lights with new LED street lighting.  The project is excepted to take 10 years and save 35 to 50 percent in energy and reproduce carbon monoxide emissions by as much as 22,000 tons per year.   More on the LED street lighting upgrade can be found on KCCI’s post here.

Installing LED lighting from the initial construction phase of a business is now becoming more and more common.  A recent project Custom Electrical Services completed in West Des Moines Iowa for R2 Financial Strategies 2nd floor build out used all LED lighting throughout there new space. 

Home owners routinely call us with questions regarding attic fans. Do they really work? What is the difference between an attic fan and a whole house fan? Prior to home air conditioning and even after, home builders generally installed attic fans for the comfort of the residents. If you are a home owner who manages to get the first floor comfortable and then when you go upstairs for the evening it is stifling, an attic fan may be the answer for you.

Having an attic fan allows you to open one or more windows and the fan will suck in the cooler outside air and blow out the warmer interior air. When you have the proper fan, those times when you would be extremely warm and increase the output of your whole house A/C system, you may be surprised you need a light blanket with an attic fan.

Attic Fan vs. Whole House Fan

Are you confused? There is no reason to be. When you speak of a whole house fan it is a unit that is installed in the ceiling. It is designed to extract the hot air from your entire home and redirect it into the attic. The positive pressure in the attic will drive the warm air through roof vents. Then the negative pressure will bring in the cooler outside air.

A single attic fan is installed at the roof level and its purpose is to draw all the warm air out of the house. If you want fresh or cool air to be brought into the home, additional vents need to be installed.

Obviously there are many more advantages to a whole house fan, but the choice is yours. Many times you can use your whole house fan instead of your expensive air conditioning. Generally, an attic fan will run during the warmest time of the day hours to pump all the hot air out of your attic. However, a whole house fan will run in the coolest times like morning, evening and overnight to bring the fresh, cool air in.

Other benefits

While you may enjoy fishing and bringing your catch back for a family feast, you can still smell the fish fry the next morning and evening. An attic fan or whole house fan can rid your home of unwanted temporary odors in a heartbeat.

We will size your home and suggest a unit that will be able to cool within a three minute period. This is so much more efficient than turning down the A/C. You will see a huge reduction in your electric bill because these fans help your A/C run more efficiently and in some instances you do not need to run you’re A/C at all.

When you make the investment, a whole house fan is quiet and can last as long as 30 years. This is vastly difference from air conditioners. It does not pull damp, rainy air into your home.

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The licensed electricians at Expert Electric receive a lot of questions about how motion sensing lights work and where to install them. Since our team has plenty of experience installing motion sensing lights in residential homes and commercial buildings, we figured it would be beneficial to help answer some of the more popular questions we receive. Keep reading to learn more about how motion sensing lights work, where to install them and how to install them.

Many of us are familiar with motion sensing lights as they have been around for some time now. They frequently make appearances in spy films and may even have been installed at your workplace. Nowadays, motion sensing lights are becoming an increasingly popular security measure in both commercial business buildings and residential homes. These motion sensing lights work by detecting infrared heat waves that can be found on moving objects. In order to ensure that the sensors are not triggered by non-human objects, it is necessary to dial them to a specific sensitivity setting that usually falls between 8 to 12 micrometers. To ensure that sensing lights are installed and working properly, it is best to contact a licensed electrician.

For residential homes, it is important to install motion sensing lights in different areas around the outside of the home, in both the front and back yard. For the front yard, consider installing the motion sensing lights to cover walkways, driveways, entranceways and stairs. For the backyard, it is important to cover any similar areas as well as patios, hot tubs, swimming pools and gates. Don’t feel that you should limit yourself to these areas. The placement of motion sensing lights is based upon each individual home. A good rule of thumb is to cover the most common pathways to home entrances as well as dark and hazardous areas throughout the property. The same goes for commercial properties although these properties will likely require a larger scale of motion sensing lights due to their size and valuables on hand. For questions about where to install motion sensing lights on either residential properties or commercial properties, contact the expert electricians at Expert Electric.

For commercial buildings and businesses, it is recommended that a licensed electrician takes care of the installation of motion sensing lights. This will ensure that the lights are working properly to protect the building and its valuables. Nowadays installing motion sensing lights in residential homes can be a simple process; however, dialing in the sensitivity settings so that the lights are not being prompted by non-human movement every hour of the night can be tricky. A licensed electrician at Expert Electric can have your residential motion sensing lights up and running in no time, allowing you to sleep safely and peacefully, free of frustrating false alarms.