So you are facility manager for a school, and you have been asked to replace old stadium lights for the football field, upgrade your stadium lights, LED has three basic advantages: reduction in energy consumed, reduced maintenance cost and a better quality of light.

LED vastly improves the quality of your sport fields and arenas. Not only do they create a higher standard in your facility, but they reduce the costs you are spending to light your areas on the back end as well. After the 3 solid reasons it’s time to upgrade to LED in your sports arena, I think you are well on your way to making the right and solidly informed decision when it comes down to purchasing your upgraded system.

Tripped circuit breaker: many of us have experienced them at some point in our homes, yet instead of asking ourselves, “Why Do Breakers Trip?”, we reset the breaker without much thought. Before flipping the switch back over to the “ON” position, however, it’s important to understand why the breaker tripped in the first place, and what can be done to keep it from happening again.

As a Top Dallas Electrician, ElectricMan Inc. understands the danger of ignoring the warning signs of a tripped circuit breaker. But first, you need to know what a breaker does and how it works.

The Job of the Circuit Breaker

Simply put, a home or business circuit breaker is a safety device that monitors the amount of electrical current going through the electrical wires in your home and shuts off the circuit if too much electricity is being pulled through it, or if there is any disturbance in the current that could result in a fire.

Whereas a fuse performs the same task but can only be used once, a circuit breaker can perform over and over with the use of a switch that trips to indicate when it has effectively cut off current to a particular area.

What Makes a Breaker Trip?

So, Why Do Breakers Trip and what kind of things could cause a circuit breaker to trip? Some of the most common causes of a tripped breaker include:

For example, in some homes, running a microwave, a toaster oven and a refrigerator all on the same circuit may cause your wires to overheat, tripping the breaker. In this instance, making the load a little lighter, or splitting the circuit, may do the trick in keeping it from tripping the breaker.

Ignoring a Tripped Breaker is Not a Good Idea

Because of the many reasons why your circuit breaker could be tripping, and because of the purpose of the circuit breaker, you should never take a tripped breaker lightly. It’s important to understand that the circuit breaker is a safety device; simply switching the circuit back on without investigating the culprit can become costly in the long run and, in many cases, extremely dangerous.

If your breaker trips consistently, chances are there is a potentially dangerous electrical issue that needs to be looked at. ElectricMan Inc. is a Top Dallas Electrician with over 27 years of residential and commercial experience in the electrical field. Call ElectricMan Inc. at 972-792-7270 to make sure that your home is safe and free from the risk of a short or a fire.

Have you ever thought about what you could do to lend a hand to our shrinking natural resources? Maybe you have cut down the amount of gas you need on a weekly basis or even switched to an electric car. You have probably noticed your pocketbook is a little fatter after cutting down on your gas bill and now that you have a little taste of what it is like to rely on other energy sources you want to learn more ways. Solar power for your home is another way you can save a little money every month while doing something good for the environment. A Pasadena electrician, like those at The Electric Connection, can help you make your home a little greener.

Modern technology has afforded us advancement in solar technology. The panels are much more neighborhood friendly and can be mounted directly on the roof of your home. They won’t take up any space in your yard. The panels are aesthetically appealing and will typically not violate any covenants that may be in your neighborhood. Because of the electrical components involved, a solar power system should only be installed by a certified electrician. Pasadena residents will want their solar power to be safe without worry an appliance will get ruined by a lack of power.

You can choose just how much solar power you want to produce by buying or leasing one or several panels. The amount of electricity you need will depend on how big your home is and how much power you need. You don’t have to worry about “running out” of electricity. When your solar power system is installed, you will still be connected to the main power grid. Your electric company will be your back up electric supply. In fact, if your solar power system produces more electricity than you use, you can typically sell it to your power company. Give The Electric Connection a call today to learn more about solar power and how it can work for you.

We often find there is a lot of confusion between Lumens and Foot Candles and Lux. And even more confusing is how some represent conversion from traditional light sources like Metal Halide and High Pressure Sodium in terms of watts, and not lumens. So why all the confusion. Well, it may be because those who represent this conversion are trying to avoid letting you know about the efficiency of the LED lights, so they claim you can replace X watts of Metal Halide with X watts of LED. What they should really say is that you can replace a 400W Metal Halide with X lumens, and their lights only need Y watts to produce these lumens. We’ll dive into this a little later, but lets first talk about lumens vs foot candles vs lux.

What is a lumen? A lumen is a measurement of light related to (1) fixture or bulb. So when we talk about lumens, we say that a fixture or bulb creates (X) lumens. These lumens are determined by sophisticated measurement equipment.

What is a foot candle? A foot candle is a unit of measurement at a specific location in a room or outdoor location that is created by 1 to many lights. It is a cumulative reading of 1 to many light sources at a specific location. It is both real and calculated. Real in the sense that you can take a light meter and walk to any location in a room or outdoor location and take a reading that represents the amount of light recorded from all contributing lights or fixtures. Calculated in the sense that you can use software to predict the foot candles of a space based on the placement of lights within the simulation.

What is lux? Lux is identical to foot candles. It is a measurement of real or calculated light, but it is done on a different scale. As a rough estimate, 1 foot candle = 10 lux.

So, simply stated, lights produces lumens, and the cumulative lumens of all lights are then determine the foot candle or lux measurement of light at a specific point in an indoor or outdoor space.

A Tiffany lamp is a style of fixture commonly associated with the Art Nouveau movement. The term is sometimes used broadly to refer to stained glass but it gets its name from the original creator and design director, Louis Comfort Tiffany – the son of Tiffany & Co. founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany.

The first Tiffany lamp was produced around 1895. In line with Tiffany’s vision that nature should inspire design, each piece featured elements of nature or geometric shapes to create intricate patterns. Each lamp was handmade by Louis himself or by an artist in his studio.

The bases of the lamps were typically sculpted from bronze with shades created from hundreds of cut glass shapes fashioned together with copper foil. These works of art took many hours of skilled craftsmanship to complete and remain popular to this day, thanks to their complex beauty.