The lighting industry has been busy as ever this month, from the slow-climbing successes of LED adoption to the discovery of new galaxies. Have you kept up? Allow us to offer a taste…

It’s only a matter of time before LEDs make serious headway into the retrofit market. Forbes predicts that by 2021, LEDs will make up approximately half of all retrofits in a market where they currently only make up about 5%. Read more…

Cree and Home Depot recently partnered to offer more affordable LED light bulbs to consumers. Nasdaq predicts that Wal-Mart will soon follow, based on a recent announcement from GE about lowering the price of their Great Value LEDs (sold at Wal-Mart). Image via houzz.com

There is an art to proper bathroom lighting, and it involves a lot more strategy than you’d think! For one, this author adamantly believes you should not light a mirror from above because it casts unsightly shadows on your face. Read more…

As the winter months approach, it’s time to start making your plan for potential power outages that often come with the yearly DMV snowfall. With the Farmer’s Almanac predicting a particularly harsh winter, the sounder the plan is, the more comfortable you’ll be when the cold hits!

Perhaps the best strategy to prevent against home blackouts is to install a stand-by generator. A standby generator supply backup power to your home when the grid goes down, keeping your home toasty and warm against the cold outside. But what else can a standby generator help your home with? Let the experts at Kolb Electric help!

Obviously, the best thing about a standby generator is that it will provide electricity to your home when your power goes out. But aside from that, it has a few distinct advantages over your basic generator that requires a manual start. A standby generator:

Despite common conception, standby generators are actually very affordable. These days, there are standby generators available from as small as three kilowatts, which are both affordable and powerful enough to provide supplementary emergency power to essential electrical systems.

Standby generators are safer, more reliable, and less expensive to run than portable generators and require no input on your part—they start and stop automatically. If you live in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, DC and want to install a standby generator in your home, call Kolb Electric today!

An electrical circuit works as a loop where electricity flows from a source and then returns to that point again after powering the device connected to it. The power flow interrupts or stops if the path is broken. There are also receptacles, fixtures, or switches joined to the course through different types of electrical wiring.

Every electrical circuit has a specific breaker or fuse that controls it. Inside the main electrical panel of your house, you will find reference numbers to identify which breaker or fuse is assigned to which circuit. Mapping of them is a standard electrical safety procedure.

power company supplies electricity to your home through the transmission and distribution lines. The energy enters the service panel, also known as the fuse or breaker box, after passing through a meter. Then, the box has three wires (hot, neutral, and ground featuring insulation of different colors) that do the jobs of transmitting the power to an external outlet, returning to the source, and providing the ground.

The wires of your home are generally installed in three ways:

It’s a wiring system where a single electrical circuit supplies power for several devices. There are various housing boxes from where both hot and neutral wires emerge and run along the route. They branch off to single receptacle and fixture.

It’s the most common of all the systems seen in residential settings.

Switch Wiring

Installed on hot wires, such a system has switches that either transmit or break the current flow to various devices or lighting fixtures. A switch changes its position to allow or interrupt the flow of electricity to electrical machines and instruments.

The system routes the hot wire through various fixtures before joining to the neutral one, which then carries the power to the source. It’s the least used and most inconvenient of all the types because it connects the devices, i.e., lights in a series. So, the circuit breaks off when just one light is burnt out.

Parallel wiring is the best option for household settings because it does not break even when one of the connected fixtures goes kaput. Nevertheless, remember not to run too many electronics from one source because each circuit can carry only a maximum electrical flow.