Did you know that proper surge protection could help avoid short circuits and fire hazards?  In fact, using up-to-date surge protectors (suppressors) for your appliances, or even your entire house, could save you thousands of dollars in property damage. These are just a few reasons why surge protection should be of the utmost importance for you and your home this holiday season.

What are power surges?

First, before diving deeper into the different advantages of protecting your home against power surges, it’s important to understand what electrical surges are, and why they’re such a concern. An electrical surge, also known as a “voltage surge”, is an electrical disturbance that can be caused by a variety of spikes in voltage. More specifically, these surges are usually caused by lightning strikes, power outages, short circuits, or tripped circuit breakers. Problems occur when these short spikes in electrical power overload circuits in home appliances and other electronics.

Why is it so important to protect your home against power surges?

For starters, power surges can be very dangerous for you, your family, and your house. Surges are one of the most common causes of house fires, usually resulting from a combination of faulty wiring and irresponsible electronics hook-up by homeowners. This is especially apparent around the holidays.

Acquiring a new home in Baltimore is an extremely exciting event for any homeowner. But it can be a time for stress, too. There’s a lot going on—keeping tabs on it all can become a bit overwhelming and, at times, outright frustrating. Because of this, our Baltimore electricians wanted to provide a quick, easy checklist for what you should be checking for in the wiring in your new Baltimore home. 

In the world of Kolb Electric, superior service is the name of the game. We’ve built our reputation of quality and dependability by providing just that! And when it comes to wiring and the electrical needs for your new home, there’s no one better in Maryland.

Keeping NEC codes in mind, unique layouts, etc; wiring can get a little bit complex and confusing. So we’re keeping this one simple, stating the primary and most important goals and methods of wiring a new home.

That got a little confusing, we know. But honestly, there are just loads of factors that come into play with your new wiring. This is why certified and licensed experts are so important! But when you work with the experts at Kolb, our Baltimore electricians can ensure you’re getting everything you want and need out of your new home wiring. Contact us today to learn more!

If your home has a fuse box, it means it has older wiring. This is not automatically a bad thing—the wiring put in was up to code at the time of installation—nor does it mean your home is unsafe. If the fuse box malfunctions, you can choose to have it repaired instead of replaced with an upgrade to a circuit breaker panel.

A fuse box and wiring can wear down over time like anything else in a home. If your house is old enough to have a fuse box, chances are strong that it and the wiring are starting to deteriorate and will begin to malfunction more and more often. You can expect to require a larger number of repairs, and in the long run it isn’t worth it to keep patching up a fuse box and aging circuitry.

An old fuse box will also have trouble keeping pace with growing household energy demands. When the fuse box was first put it, there were lower voltage demands on the circuits in most houses than there are today. Your home likely uses more power than it did only 10 years ago, and the fuse box may not be enough to handle this higher power load.

Finally, fuse boxes are simply less convenient than circuit breaker panels. Instead of replacing fuses when they get blown, you only have to reset the tripped breaker.

Replacing a fuse box with a circuit breaker panel does more than simply tear out one component and put in a new one. The wiring around the panel will probably also need to be replaced with upgraded wiring so that it matches the capacity of the new installation.

Keep that old wiring in mind as well. This might be a good time to schedule a whole-house re-wiring to go along with the circuit breaker. This will bring your home up to current electrical code requirements, offer more efficient power, and lessen issues from outages.

We strongly urge homeowners who still have fuse boxes to make the change to the modern electrical panel.

We use electricity everyday of our lives; powering our televisions, lights, and appliances. While these may seem easy enough to turn on with one click of a button, the steps that go into powering these things can be complex. Here is a look at the systems that go into powering your home.

All electricity originates from the electrical utility company, BC Hydro in most cases. The electricity is transferred through power lines or underground lines to your home where it will go through the following series of connections:

Problems can occur at any point in this process. The inner workings of all these systems are complex and dangerous if tampered with. Expert Electric understands all the complexities and inner workings of your home electrical system. We can assist at any point to diagnose and fix any problems you may be experiencing.

I have a great deal of interest in digital photography, but my life is as crazy as anyone else’s. My son, family, and work keep me busy from dawn to midnight every day. I’ve never had time to cultivate any photography skills, even though I’ve always been very interested, sitting on the edge of my seat, if you will, for a chance to take some digital photos in order to learn a little about how capturing light can create astonishing works of art.

My interview with Matthew Danser had given me my long sought “excuse” to try out some photography techniques. But it also required that I put in an honest effort. The thought in the back of my head: These photos are going to suck. Probably a lot. And they will most likely be seen by the thousands of people who visit this blog monthly. Second gulp.

But I’m the kind of person so riddled with ADHD that even my paranoia about being judged on a mass scale can only last about three minutes before the audacity to try anything resurfaces and action is taken. So here’s what happens when a total amateur who has no idea what he is doing tries to “Paint with Light.”

A one-dollar flashlight from – you guessed it – the Dollar General. One dollar. Even. Gotta love it. Especially since it’s all I could afford, seeing as how I’m still paying off the aforementioned Nikon that I bought to take photos of our baby son. (True, a million pictures have been taken of him during his first year-and-a-half on Earth. However, 999,999 of those photos were taken with an iPhone. Go figya.)

THE PLAN, STAN:

The plan was to wait until it was dark in the apartment and do some light painting. I knew that I could use the Shutter mode on my camera to set it to take exposures of up to thirty seconds. I saw that my camera also had an option for bulb release, so, invoking Danser, who recalls how his girlfriend had to hold down the button on his camera for a full thirteen minutes, I determined that if I asked really nicely, I might be able to persuade my wife to hold down the trigger to get exposures longer than thirty seconds. Otherwise, thirty seconds was my window of time to do all the light painting I could.

I started off pretty timidly. I had seen photos online in which people used long exposures to create squiggly lines. The most popular examples are pictures of traffic at night, headlights and tail lights streaming, giving you a sense of the fluid motion of busy intersections. You’ve also seen those nature pics in which streams and rivers and clouds and stars become gauzy with movement because of long exposures.

But what I really like about Danser’s work is the use of color. The effect of running inside the hut and popping off red-gelled flashes shown at the beginning of this blog post (Matthew Danser! And happy lightpainting, everyone!