Keeping your home and family safe is a high priority for every homeowner. One of the best, yet often neglected ways to ensure their safety is to make sure that all of your home’s electrical components are in safe and good working order. When it comes to electricity, being safe is always far better than being sorry. Rather than worrying about loose wires, short circuits and other potentially dangerous situations, work with an electrician in Los Angeles to make sure that your home is as safe as it possibly can be.

Attempting to solve electrical problems on your own can not only put you in immediate danger, but can also make the problems worse than they were to start with. While it is perfectly fine to replace light bulbs, flip breakers back on and perform other similar simple tasks by yourself, tackling anything that has to do with wiring or the other electrical components in your home should be left to the professionals.

If you have a breaker or breakers that trip frequently, then it is time to call a Los Angeles electrician. This can be a sign that you may have malfunctioning appliances, or an overloaded circuit. This might mean that you need to address a problem with a particular appliance, or your electrical service in general. In some case, a small panel upgrade can add additional circuits to your home, allowing you to more evenly spread the load.

Regardless of whether you are faced with an electrical issue or if you need to have electrical components such as a whole house surge protector installed, your safety and the integrity of your home depend on the skills and experience that only a licensed, professional electrician has. For any questions, or to talk about your electrical jobs and problems, give us a call today at The Electric Connection. We’ll look forward to hearing from you.

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LED sign lighting provides years of illumination and low energy costs. sign modules that consume 50mA of power each. Required materials differ depending on sign size, module size, length of wire between modules, current draw, and lumen output.

Materials:

1. First, measure your sign. Although we recommend spacing module rows 3 inches apart, it’s ultimately up to you. If you want a brighter sign, place them closer together and vice versa for a dimmer sign. With the recommended 3-inch spacing, a 4-foot square sign would need 150 modules (15 rows of 10). Again, the quantity of modules needed  is based on many factors and can differ.

These LED sign modules are available in custom lengths of up to 20 modules per strand. Order 60 feet (4 feet x 15 rows) of stranded modules, and cut the strand after every 10 modules. Each strand can be cut to make two rows.

2. Next you’ll need to order a power supply that’s rated for the combined wattage of all sign modules. To ensure that you don’t overwork the power supply, confirm that the total wattage of your modules is at least 20 percent less than the power supply’s rated wattage.

An easy way to calculate this is to multiply the total wattage of your combined lighting by 1.2. In the 4-foot sign diagram, there are 150 modules with a current draw of 50 milliamps (mA) each. Since current draw is given in milliamps, multiply that number by voltage and move the decimal 3 places to the left to get wattage. This module consumes 50 mA and has 12 VDC operation, so it consumes 0.6 watts (50 x 12 = 600). Next, multiply 0.6 by 150 to get a combined wattage of 90 and multiply that number by 1.2 (90 x 1.2 = 108) to determine which power supply you’ll need. Since the result was 108, you will need at least a 120-watt power supply.

3. Next on the list is wire to connect all your sign module stands to the power supply. For a 4-foot sign, you’ll need 4 feet of 18-gauge two-conductor wire to serve as your main line plus enough to cover the distance between your power supply and where it will be wired into an electrical system. You’ll also need dual-channel T-tap wire splice connectors for an easy connection to your main line.

Before you begin working on your sign, turn off power to the area.

4. If there isn’t one already, drill a hole in the back of your sign as an exit point for your wire.

5. Use a tape measure or ruler to plot your row spacing. Leave space on one side of the sign for your module-to-main-line connections. Mount the sign modules using their double-sided adhesive and/or screw holes.

6. Insert the end wires of each sign module row into the T-tap splice connector, and clamp the other end of the connector onto the main line. The splice connectors eliminate the need to strip wire insulation.

7. Use double-sided foam tape to secure each T-tap splice connector to the inside of your sign.

8. Reattach your sign’s front cover.

9. Connect the main line to your power supply, wire the supply into your electrical system, and restore power to the area.

For technical questions, don’t hesitate to call us toll free at 866-590-3533. Our customer service and technical support teams are available from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. CDT Monday-Thursday and 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. CDT on Friday.

We see plenty of tips and tricks for residential electric company owners that are meant to help save them money, but what about business owners? Businesses face the same issues as residential customers. When electric rates rise, businesses lose money from their bottom line. In order to keep the bottom line healthy or just to save a few dollars that could be put to use in other areas, it is important managers and employees learn a bit about energy savings. An electrician in Burbank, like those at The Electric Connection, has some tips that can help you lower the electric bill while lessening the demand on the power grid. It is a win-win situation.

*On Fridays, turn off power strips and unplug things like the coffee maker and other small appliances in the office. This will help reduce the phantom power that is drawn even when appliances, computers and other equipment are not in use.

*Install motion sensors in the copy room, bathrooms and supply rooms that are not always in use and do not always need to have lights on. The sensors detect movement and will automatically turn the lights on when somebody enters the room and shuts the light off when a person leaves the room.

*Switch your lighting to LED. This is a huge energy saver and you will see savings on your next Burbank electrical bill. Track lighting is common in offices. These fixtures are typically equipped to handle the energy-efficient LEDs. If you need to upgrade your existing lights, talk with your local electrician.

*Make sure to regularly maintain the fans on your computers. Keeping the computers dust free helps them run better and will ultimately lose less energy. This also applies to the coils on the office refrigerator and the furnace filters. Dust isn’t just unsightly—it costs you money!

If you have any questions or would like to schedule a lighting upgrade in your office, give The Electric Connection a call today.

Whether you have a scheduled lighting project or an emergency on your hands, there are plenty of situations when it’s appropriate to call in a local electrician for the job.

Repairing a Wire Damaged from Drilling a Hole in the WallWhether you’re hanging pictures, shelves or a TV mounting bracket—or any other reason you might be drilling into a wall—there’s always the possibility that you’ll hit and damage a wire. This is definitely a fix you want to leave in the capable hands of a certified electrician.

To prevent the problem from happening again, use a stud finder and aim for the center of the stud. Before drilling, use a small tipped screw driver to verify you are hitting the stud and not the side. Once you have verified, feel free to drill away.

Any time of the year is a good time to save money, especially when it comes to the issue of one’s electricity bill. However, it is very understandable that the summer season is when one’s electricity bills tend to go straight through the roof because of the increasingly hot weather! This summer season, make sure that you end up saving some money on your electricity bill with the following energy savings cost cutting tips.

For starters, make sure that you keep your TVs and also your lamps quite a distance away from your thermostat. You see, both TVs and lamps emit heat, therefore prompting your air conditioning to actually run excessively and more than it really has to! Instead, place your TV and lamps across the room and think hard about switching to compact fluorescent bulbs.

Insulation is yet another thing you should do properly if you want to attend to your energy savings and your summer electricity cost cutting steps. You ought to insulate in an intelligent manner, for one thing. This means that you should look to insulate in some areas more than others, such as the attic. When you insulate your attic, you actually lower the negative effects of the heat that stem from the scorching rays of the sun. If you do this correctly, you are going to stop the heat that tends to build up on top of your home from actually filtering down to the rest of the residence.

Sometimes, your summer electricity cost cutting measures are so simple that they may even seem deceptively…simple! Take for instance the issue of your windows. When days get really, really hot in the summer months, just remember to close either your blinds or your curtains prior to leaving for work in the morning. This will minimize the effect of the sun’s blistering rays from beating down into the various rooms of your residence, thereby warming up your home to unbearable levels. As a sweet bonus, the fading effect of the sun’s rays to your rugs and your furniture will also be minimized.

Finally, you should use your microwave more than the oven for when you are preparing dinner. If you utilize your microwave, you can efficiently get your dinner ready in just a few minutes rather than an hour, and you will also be generating a lot less heat than if you utilize your oven!

So as you can verily see, there are a lot of things that you can do with regard to saving some money on your electricity bills over the summer. All that matters is that you have to be committed to adopting some of these money saving tips over the summer.