As a Top Plano Electrician, I know better than anyone how powerful and useful electricity is. It also makes me more aware of what most people tend to ignore or forget: electricity is dangerous. Electricians are required by law to carry insurance, and for good reasons. Electric current is capable of starting fires and destroying your property and equipment in a matter of moments. The proper safety precautions really can save lives, and there‘s always something we can do to improve home safety.

One of the most important precautions is located in your electrical panel: the circuit breaker. It is designed to keep you from using more electricity than the wiring or receptacle can handle at one time, what we refer to as overcurrent protection. This protects your wiring from taking on too much current, which can cause the coating around your wiring to melt, the leading cause of electrical fires. Circuit breakers serve another purpose as well; not only to protect from surges coming from outside your home, but from potential hazards within it as well. Current flowing through a failed piece of equipment or appliance can cause sparks, which have the potential to start fires or damage other electrical devices. A properly functioning circuit breaker can shut off the power to this device. It’s very important, however, that you use a circuit breaker of the proper size for the circuit to ensure that your wiring is properly protected.

Circuit breakers come in specialty varieties as well; the most important are ground fault circuit breakers (GFCI), for wet locations, and arc fault circuit breakers (AFCI). AFCI’s, in particular, can help prevent some of the most common dangerous situations in your home.

I’ve dealt with plenty of cases where electrical fires have started because people ran an extension cord under the carpet, so that they can power the lamp in the center of the room. Over time, people walking over the cord stretches out the wiring, making it so thin that the current overloads the thinly stretched wire, creating an arc fault; the electricity “jumps” the wire, completing the circuit in a way the cord can’t handle and generating heat that starts a fire. Arc fault circuit breakers prevent this by shutting the circuit down when the arc fault occurs.

So what do you need to know about arc fault circuit breakers? To start with, by code AFCI’s should be installed on any circuit that isn’t protected by a GFCI or directly wired into an appliance. It’s in your best interest to have your safety devices routinely inspected to maintain their optimum performance and capabilities; in particular, your circuit breakers should be inspected at least once a year. The inspection process is quick and relatively inexpensive, and something that simple really can save the lives of you and your family.

Office spaces are a place for color temperature of 5600k, we don’t need to quite match this. A level between 5000k to 6000k will do fine for an office environment to prevent sleepiness.

Exposure to non-artifical light (aka, natural light from the sun) is known to this post by luxreview.com that should lead you in the right direction.

From there, ensuring you know all of the rules in your area will be the best route to ensuring you aren’t breaking any laws with an improper lighting system. The added benefit to following these rules is you can drastically reduce any possible liabilities you may incur if you had otherwise ignored these rules. So, we find it best to follow them!

Additional considerations

Not only are the above tips important to consider, but strongly considering LED office light technology can prove to supply the above benefits along with the following:

Energy savings.

It’s not uncommon for companies to list of 9 ways LED beats fluorescent on our blog, it’s certainly worth checking out.

Longer lifespans.

Longer life spans by 2 to 3 times is very common when converting to LED from other lighting technologies, just as much as its very common for the insane energy savings we talked about above.

This has two mains benefits which we always talk about: the less often need to buy replacement tubes as well as fewer maintenance costs to pay someone to replace those lights. We like to think of the second as an indirect way longer lifespans saves you money, and it’s certainly a great benefit.

Conclusion

We’ve not only covered tips to consider when implementing a better lighting system into your office but also why LED might be a great option for doing so while also reducing overhead costs. Hopefully, by following these tips you find your way to a more productive office and lower overhead.

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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.