As the temperatures get cooler, Californians are going to be turning on the heat. Cold nights means a lot more people are going to be relying on their furnaces and space heaters to take the chill off. These things are electricity hogs and can quickly tax the power grid. This combined with poor weather in general can lead to a power outage. The outage may last a couple of hours of be much longer and really wreak havoc on your daily schedule as well as basic duties like making a meal, cleaning the house or taking a hot shower. Your Beverly Hills electrician has some tips to help you prepare for a temporary power outage. The team at The Electric Connection knows how much of an inconvenience living without electricity can be and hopes to help you ride it out in relative comfort.

*Your best option is to have a standby generator installed by an electrician in Beverly Hills. This ensures you always have a back up source of power and never have to go without. The generators are enclosed in a box, which helps reduce noise. You won’t have to worry about your neighbors complaining about the noisy generator.

*Putting together a kit that includes essentials like spare batteries, flashlights, emergency candles, matches and a solar charger for your phone and other gadgets will save you a lot of frustration. The solar chargers are relatively inexpensive and ensure your phone, laptop and tablet will get charged.

*Put together a little box of goodies that you can eat without worrying about heating the food up. Things like crackers, energy bars and a couple cans of beans will give you something to munch on while you wait for the power to be restored. Don’t forget the manual can opener.

Power outages are rarely very long, but even an hour without electricity can throw you off a bit. Avoid dealing with it by talking with an electrician. Beverly Hills homeowners who invest in a standby generator will never have to worry about eating cold beans for dinner. Give The Electric Connection a call today to learn more about generators and preparing for power outages.

I grew up in the 90’s, back when thrift store shopping was considered alternative and grunge.  While I tooled around Goodwill listening to Nine Inch Nails on my Walkman, my more sophisticated friends were at the mall, looking adorable & stylish in the latest trend from The Limited.

But that was the 90’s.

Thrift-store shopping, dumpster-diving, and hand-me downs deliver a new parlance that has clever DIY’ers quaking with excitement for Saturday yard sales and obsessively scouring Craigslist for the Next Big Find.  This elegant new term for taking used items and making them new = REPURPOSING.

Also commonly referred to as recycling, upcycling, reinventing, revitalizing and/or reusing, entire boards are dedicated to this subject on Pinterest. Everything – and I mean everything – can be repurposed.  So why not the light bulb?

With a few basic tools and a steady hand, a light bulb can be hollowed out and transformed into a unique gift or decorative project.  Prepping the bulb, however, is not a task that we recommend for the kids.  Before you undertake any of these projects, take a moment to read a tutorial on how to safely hollow out a light bulb.

1. Witches Brew

A lot of time we are asked what is the equivalent LED product to convert from Metal Halide, High Pressure Sodium or Mercury Vapor. And a lot of time, we have a product in mind that works based on past experience. But how did we come up with that product, and how did we make the original decision on what was the proper replacement?

There’s a lot of science that goes into light, color, quality, and each light had it’s own characteristics. For example, it takes less LED to replace High Pressure Sodium than it takes to replace Metal Halide. And we are talking a lot more than just lumens. We are talking about color temperature, quality of light and something called photopic / scotopic lumens.

In the world of lighting, we measure foot candles with a light meter, this is called a photopic measurement. The light meter picks up everything, including spectrum’s that are invisible to us. Now, we humans see things to, and this is called scotopic lumens. Our rods and cones read and interpret light. And it does so differently than what a light meter does. So it is not uncommon when we demo a LED Light against a HPS light or Metal Halide, we first ask “Which is brighter” before we show the light meter reading. It leaves a few people scratching their heads. Well, that’s the science of of it all, and fortunately there is some handy tables called SP ratios that allow us to take the lumens of a particular light (photopic lumens) and multiply it by the S/P ratio to get the scotopic lumens equivalent.

For example, the S/P ratio for High Pressure Sodium is 0.40. The S/P ratio for LED at 5000K is 1.8. So if you take 40,000 lumens of HPS and multiply it 0.4, the effective scotopic lumens is 16,000. To get the same amount of lumens from LED, take the 16,000 and divide it by the S/P ratio and you get 8888 lumens. So the 8888 lumens of LED is the photopic measurement, the 16,000 LED lumens is the scotopic lumens measurement. So in an nutshell, you need 8,888 lumens of LED to replace 40,000 lumens of HPS from a scotopic point of view.

Here is a handy chart of common lights and ratios for you to use.

Our electrical system runs behind the walls and in our ceilings and floors. It is invisible, except for outlets and fixtures. Electricity is intrinsically counter-intuitive to think about. In fact, despite recent technological developments, we’ve only known how electricity works since the turn of the 20th century. So, you can be forgiven if even common residential electrics seem somewhat mysterious. Moreover, repairing these electrical systems requires the professional knowledge of a Kirkland electrician, who knows how to properly handle and harness electrical energy and run it safely through your home. In this post, we’d like to examine a few of the most common electrical repairs, so that you might be able to identify any problems and call for assistance.