Spring is notorious for some wild thunderstorms that have been known to knock out the power for several hours and in some cases, several days. When the storm is especially large and the outage is widespread, you are going to struggle to get basic necessities like batteries for the flashlights, canned food and stuff for sandwiches. You are also going to be relegated to cold showers until the power is restored. It paints a pretty grim picture. You can prepare for a power outage and avoid all of the issues caused by not having electricity by having a generator installed by an electrician. Glendale homeowners can rely on The Electric Connection to take care of the installation and answer any questions they may have about standby generators.

Standby generators are an ideal option for anybody who is not keen to go even a few hours without electricity. If you have somebody in the home that relies on electric medical equipment, you work from home or you have small children, having a backup electricity plan is an excellent idea. Standby generators are different from the portable kind and are installed as a permanent fixture to the home by a licensed electrician in Glendale.

The generators are extremely easy to use and don’t require you to do anything but add fuel from time to time. A switch will be installed by a Glendale electrician that automatically turns the generator on when the power goes out. You won’t have to run extension cords or deal with difficult to start engines. You will need to determine how much power your home needs to stay functioning so you can purchase the right generator. If you are not sure, you can always give the team at The Electric Connection a call to learn more about standby generators and how they can help you ride out a storm.

We all know or at least heard that converting from Metal Halide (High Intensity Discharge) to LED will save you money.

But how much? Are there any other reasons or difference you should know about?

In this article, we break down all the factors that you should be aware of before making a decision to convert from Metal Halide to LED. Here are the 9 reasons we think LED wins over Metal Halide.

Let’s take a look at the information on a typical 400 watt metal halide bulb. While specifications may vary, a visit to a popular online website that sells Metal Halide bulbs shows that a brand new bulb has the following specifications:

We have just as many customers wanting to convert to LED because of maintenance savings as they do for energy savings. Think about what we discussed, over the life of the LED retrofit kit, a customer would have to do 5-6 Metal Halide replacements. The higher the installation height, the higher the cost of replacement. And if you have a facility loaded with lights, this becomes a significant budget amount every year that you must take into consideration. Now, we know that reduced maintenance time on lights does not translate into dollars saved because it is highly unlikely that people will lose their jobs over the fact there is much less work to do. However, these people will have time to now work on things that matter, like fixing the machines that make the company money instead on replacing lights that cost the company money.

When you take a measurement of light with a light meter, it reads lumens. And this measurement of all the lights that contribute to the light at that location creates a measurement called foot candles. But let’s think about that light that is being measured. Metal Halide creates all sorts of light, in all spectrum’s, visible or otherwise. This includes UV and IR spectrum’s, visible to the measuring device but not visible to the human eye. LED, on the other hand, does not produce UV and IR. Therefore, its readings using the same light meter is only picking up visible spectrum’s.

So there is a fun little test you can do. Have 2 light sources, LED and Metal Halide. And first ask, which one is brighter? And if the right LED source was selected, they should say LED. And then use a light meter, and the light meter may say the Metal Halide area is producing more foot candles. And so now you know part of the reason, but wait, there’s 2 other pieces of information you need to know.

Click here to see our infographic on Retrofitting vs Replacing.

Conclusion

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This issue almost exclusively applies to instructions on how to safely repair it.

The average rated life of a light bulb represents how long it took for half of the bulbs to fail during testing (given perfect conditions). If your bulb lasted 12,315 hours (you counted!) but the label touted an average rated of life of 20,000 hours, you’re actually still within range of an acceptable life span.

We measure LED bulbs a bit differently since they never technically burn out, but rather fade over time. Instead, the Lighting FactsTM label indicates LED lumen maintenance (LM), which is an estimate of the bulb’s lumen depreciation over a given time.

Solution: Understand that the expected lifespan of your light bulb is simply an estimate based on testing that was performed in a controlled environment. When a bulb burns out earlier than that estimate, it doesn’t always mean something is wrong with it.