To answer the question “Should I worry about electrical repairs in a new home?” we need to specify what new means. Was the house built recently? Or is it “new” because it is new to you, regardless of its age? In either case, there is a simple rule to follow: if you think you need electrical repairs, you probably do—no matter how old the house is. Always worry about electrical repairs if there are signs that you need them.

When you move into any home built more than 10 years ago, you should hire an electrician to check the system for problems. Despite surface appearances, a home may have wiring troubles from DIY repair attempts from a previous owner; you want to make sure there are no serious problems that need immediate repair to prevent safety hazards.

With a home built pre-1970, you may encounter difficulties from an electrical system that cannot support modern demands. Check on the outlets and the circuit breaker panel. If the home has two-prong outlets and a fuse box instead of a circuit breaker panel, you should have new installations done to upgrade the system. Otherwise you may end up with some major repair worries in the near future. Older circuit breaker panels are often not up to the task of contemporary power needs. If you experience frequent blown fuses or tripped breakers, have a repair technician investigate right away.

With a recently-built house, you shouldn’t have many concerns about your power needs: the home should have sufficient wiring, updated GFCI outlets, and a new circuit breaker panel. However, you can’t simply go lax about small signs of difficulties or indications of improper electrical installation. Look for flickering lights that indicate small power surges. Although these rarely trip circuit breakers, they can cause damage to appliances over time. Call for a repair technician to see if your new home will benefit from a whole-house surge protector.

Check around your ceiling fixtures on occasion to see if they are growing hot. This indicates poor electrical insulation and sometimes occurs in new homes due to poor installation. If you detect poor electrical installation problems in one place in your home, they probably exist elsewhere; call for an electrician to examine your home’s electrical system thoroughly for faults.

As a facility manager or building owner, it is nearly impossible to know everything about everything in your building. But it is vital to know something about everything, and that goes for your facilities lighting system too. Whether you manage a warehouse, factory, or other industrial sized building or space, the lighting is a huge factor of many things including safety, productivity, and consistency in the work in your facility.

So while you don’t need to know every facility managers and building owners should know about there lighting system and how lighting can make all the difference in various amounts of ways.

1. Not all lights are created equal. This is an obvious one, not all lighting technologies are created the same and all output at different levels. Firstly you have lighting technologies that are less efficient than others. Such as metal halide and HPS which are 2-3 times less efficient than LED technology is. Then you also have efficiency based on a “product to product” basis. For example; while LED is the clear winner in efficiency over metal halide (and really any other lighting technology), one LED product from one company isn’t going to be the same as the next company’s LED product. This is where you really need to dig deep and find the company that offers the most efficient lighting products over all other companies.

Key takeaway? First, understand that LED is the most efficient in a general sense, but also understand that each company and product varies on its own personal efficiency and you should always do your homework before going with one LED product over another!

2. New lighting system upgrade costs can be reduced with rebates. This is only a true statement when you are buying commercially qualified lighting products that are DesignLights Consortium qualified. return on investment overtime by decreased energy costs associated with running your lights. Obviously this ROI period will vary depending on how long you run your lights per day on average, but especially in big facilities they almost always are used often and thus, provide a good and even quick payback period.

4. Create safer environments with a proper lighting system. With low quality light output, you create an unsafe environment that can cause various issues. Lighting fixtures that aren’t outputting the proper amount of light after a few years into there life is all caused reasoning to retrofit over fully replace.

Over time, things can go wrong with any electrical system. It’s part of the nature of wiring:  wires deteriorate and connections can break down.  But what if the problem that develops is because of something that happened when the electrical system was installed, something you didn’t have any control over?

There’s nothing so treacherous to the safety of your home as faulty wiring. Mistakes in the initial wiring of your home can lead to serious safety hazards and property damage.

So what can you do about faulty wiring?  A licensed Dallas electrician can help you find the problem areas in your wiring and repair them, but we generally don’t get called in until the faulty wiring causes a serious problem.  Nobody really has the time or money to deal with these problems, so it’s better to not have to suffer through them in the first place. The best way to do that is to be aware of the electrical warning signs that your wiring might be faulty.