At Expert Electric we often get calls from our customers requesting chandelier installation. A chandelier is a great lighting option. Adding a new chandelier can do a lot to change the look and feel of a room. It adds style to your home while lighting effectively. A chandelier is basically a beautiful piece of illuminated art. The installation of a new chandelier will vary with the type and size you choose and the location it is to be installed in. Choosing the right chandelier is a very personal choice. But whatever chandelier you choose, your electrician, in almost all cases, can install it for you.

Ceiling Heights and Chandeliers

It’s full-on spring, and there seems to be a lot of activity in the landscape lighting world. That’s probably because landscape lighting is generally a great and affordable way to significantly improve the curb appeal of your home. Landscape lighting ideas abound on the internet, and, since it’s a popular season for landscape lights, I thought I would curate for you some of the best landscape lighting I have seen out there on the Web.

1. Wall Grazing at Its Finest

Wall grazing is a lighting technique in which light is cast up or down a wall in order to let the light and shadow play off the wall’s texture. Wall grazing works especially well on this wonderfully textured stone wall. Interesting walls like this almost demand uplights to play off their texture.

2. Cinematic Pond Beacon Situation

Very bright light on this structure in the middle of a pond creates a dramatic, almost cinematic effect. Bright uplights on the trees give some context to the attractive structure.

3. Variations on a Path

Using different styles of path light can make the walk to the house much more interesting. Never assume it’s law that all your path lights match. Mixing it up a little gives the eye a lot more to look at, and the outdoor lighting design looks more calculated, in a good way. Instead of the string of path lights that come in a pack, this is conscious design that makes every trip to the front door pleasant.

4. Variation on Variations on a Path

Another way you can break the monotony of path lighting is to place your path lights according to the visual features along the path, like plants or garden ornaments. Setting up the path lights to be spaced a little farther apart and placing them in different proximity to the path – now directly on the path, now set back near some interesting plants – leads the eye farther down the path, which creates a spectacle and gives the eye much more to admire.

5. Path Lighting without all the Path Lights

Landscape lighting doesn’t always have to include path lights. Here, adequate illumination and very attractive lighting design is achieved by uplighting trees and using downlights mounted on the house.

6. Moon Lighting: A Supernatural Experience?

Moonlighting is a technique in which lights are hidden higher up in trees to create an ambient effect. Pretty cool!

7. Under Counter Lights

One really cool outdoor lighting effect is under counter lighting. Led rope, tape, or LED tape rope hybrid can be run under the edge of counter, stone wall ledge, bar, island, or bridge to create a wonderful lighting effect. This is one application in which LED landscape lighting works really well.

8. Water + Lighting =  Awesome

What’s cooler than light fixtures giving an almost otherworldly beauty to outdoor water features? This is my personal favorite kind of landscape lighting. It just provides such a reliably relaxing and comfortable atmosphere. If your home is your sanctuary, you might want to consider this one-two-three punch of water, sound, and light.

9. Shadowy Magic

Moonlighting can also be used to create cool shadows on the path. See that light mounted up in that tree? It mimics the light of the moon, creating interesting shadows on the ground and enough ambient light to see where you’re walking. Great lighting design.

10. Lit Up Night Time Oasis

There are a lot of interesting things going on here. The space feels large and luxurious, in part because that uplight at the back draws the eye directly to the back edge of the space, making the whole spread look larger. The path lights around the perimeter draw attention to the landscaping. Of course, the star of this show is the cove lighting used around the bridge, making it look almost as if it is floating on light. Yes to this.

11. Epic Landscape Lighting in a Park

I mean, this pretty much speaks for itself. The high powered uplights illuminating the tall canopy creates an amazing effect. Not only is it beautiful, but it also represents the dual purpose of landscape lighting: To beautify and to make safer. Urban parks can be dangerous, but this one looks even more welcoming at night.

It isn’t hard to install new electrical outlets, but it’s important to prep your home accordingly. To avoid any strange scenarios, check out the three tips below:

Before adding a new outlet, you’ll need to make sure your breaker panel is turned off. Double-check that your breaker is turned off with a voltage tester. If you don’t have a voltage tester, plug in a lap to the nearest-available socket. Additionally, it’s a good idea to test the new socket directly by plugging the excess length into an electrical application.

Understandably, you may find it difficult to jab through drywall when making room for an outlet. Instead of cutting with a saw, consider using a flat head screwdriver. It’s cheaper, more adaptable and can easily carve through drywall. If you do settle for a saw, make sure you’re not sawing too aggressively. Aggressive sawing can tear a drywall surface’s paper backside—which will reduce the wall’s structural integrity. If your screwdriver-made hole is too small, you can make it bigger with a utility knife.

If you’re working with fabric-insulated wiring, it’ll be a good idea to contact your electrician. Your electrician can recommend various safe connections, making sure you’re not engaging unsafe projects without a grounding wire. Without a grounding wire, it can be difficult to tell which wires are neutral and hot.

The electrical enclosures may be one of the simplest electrical components but it is important that you design it properly. While it may be a simple component to specify, the extensive choices available in the market might overwhelm or confuse you. The most obvious choice might not always be the best in terms of reliability and long-term profitability. At the same time there may be under-rated choices that might turn out be great buys.

Let’s see how to approach enclosure design.

Critical Design Aspects to Keep in Mind

• Material Selection

Plastic or metal are the most popular choices. These groups can be further categorized into polycarbonate, ABS, aluminumpolystyrene, steel or cast iron. Select the material that can withstand the surrounding conditions of the location it will be installed in. Understand your needs and make a decision accordingly.

• Internal Design & Size of Enclosure

Consider the internal design of the enclosure. The design must meet with your requirements. Note the internal and external dimensions to make better use of the space inside, for housing your component. It is also important to take mounting options into account.

• Choosing the Right Metal

Popular choices include:

An email from a customer on Wednesday made our week: “I’m really late in sending you a picture of my kitchen that Pegasus helped create. Every time I turn on the under cabinet lights,  I still get that great feeling from the first time. ” And what a beautiful kitchen it is:

Fluorescent T5 Thin-Inch Light Fixtures in her kitchen remodel. We were just as thrilled with the email she sent us in the midst of the remodel:

Just wanted to let you know how pleased I am with my experiences with your website, customer service and products. I hate to be long-winded, but it”s important for me to tell you about my search for under cabinet lighting. Because I’m spending lots of money on a remodel which included gutting the kitchen, I wanted to be sure to choose the best product for the lighting under the new cabinets.

After searching at the big box stores and getting no more info than what was written on the lighting display, I tried two local lighting specialty stores. Believe it or not, I was told at one of them by the manager that xenon doesn’t have a color temperature. (I decided he had to have been born and raised on a planet with different laws of physics.) No one could really help me at all and seemed totally disinterested in trying to sell me anything. Discouraged, I came home and Googled “under cabinet lighting.”

Your website is a window on the world of lighting! Oh, my goodness, the articles about lighting, the recommendations, the product descriptions!! I was totally elated, then began to think maybe it was just too good to be true, so I revisited your website a few more times over the next few days. Then…….just to be 100% sure…….I called your toll-free number and talked with a customer service representative. I told her that I wanted WHITE light for the under cabinet lighting: standard fluorescent is too blue, daylight and LED is too green and xenon seems too yellow, so I wanted to be sure to get a color temperature that would be white. I also wanted lighting that would produce as little heat as possible. She recommended the Thin-Inch with a color temp of 4100K. We talked about my previous experiences for a couple of minutes and I thanked her for being so helpful and we ended the call.

After all that, can you believe I was still a little nervous about ordering? A couple of days later, I decided to suck it up and take the plunge. So I measured all the spaces under the cabinets, made my list using your recommendations about installing under each cabinet and filling the under cabinet width and ordered online. The shipment arrived a day early which was a very pleasant surprise. The kitchen is now mostly finished.

But the best part of it all is what the under cabinet lighting does for the backsplash! It is AMAZING!! That awesome WHITE light is perfect…….no other word describes it. And after arguing with the electrician about the placement of the fixture at the front of the under cabinet space, not the back, he agreed that the front works best as your website recommends. My experience with Pegasus has been one of the best and easiest of this remodel. Thank you so much! I’m looking forward to having it all done and sending you photos.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lea, for reminding us why we do what we do!

We are so happy you love your new kitchen.