This week’s Product Spotlight has fallen on Valentine’s Day, and that couldn’t be more apt, since our

If you’re looking for a way to add a little dazzle back into your landscape, halogen landscape lights might be just what you need. Imagine being able to stroll with your sweetie down softly lit pathways on warm nights under the stars, or showing off your prized garden to friends and family, even after the sun goes down.

You can use halogen landscape lights to enhance walkways and flowerbeds or the areas around your decks and patios. These lights can also accent plants or architectural features, adding beautiful points of light around the outside of your home or business.

Find Your Perfect Style Match

Each of our halogen landscape lights is made of elegant black powder coated metal, and comes with a mounting spike and halogen light bulb.

You can choose from 3 different shapes:

1. Seashell

3. Cone

If you live in a stormy or cataclysmic area, then you know how important it is to have a plan – an escape route, a first aid kit, a survival backpack, and anything else you might need to get by when push comes to shove. A few weeks ago a nasty storm hit our area, knocked over some power lines, and took the transformers with them. This left us and our neighbors without power for the better part of two weeks. Once the dust settled and we recovered, it was time to invest in a backup generator.

The Perfect Plan B

There are loads of generators to choose from, with as many makes and models and your local car dealership. It used to be just a pull chord engine you’d plug the necessities into like the fridge and stove. Now you can plug your whole house into one if you need to. The choices are far beyond what is expected. The man at the store helped me wade through all the options, weeding out all the unnecessarily bulky models and the ones too small to power the house.

After all the work, we finally found what we needed. Now we just had to find out how to get it home and hooked up. No amount of do-it-yourself material was going to help me here. I needed a professional. The man at the store gave a good recommendation and just like that the project was underway.

In a nutshell, generators have come a long way. Having a professional doing the job is an absolute must; most of the terminology was foreign and there were wires everywhere. But after a day or two the job was done, and the generator sits nicely in the backyard, waiting for bad weather to strike again. We’ll be ready this time.

The cost of energy is something that everyone’s concerned about and with energy costs projected to continue rising for the foreseeable future, it should come as no surprise that an increasing number of people are looking for ways to reduce their energy consumption and of course, their bills. If you’ve been following the news, you’ve probably heard about something called a smart meter. What you may not know about these devices, however, is exactly what they are and what makes them special.

Can installing a smart meter in your home help you to save on your energy bill? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this new generation of power meters? Keep reading for the answers to these questions.

Smart meters are designed to work with new smart power grid technologies which are being implemented in several countries and like the grids themselves, they are designed to help consumers to use energy more efficiently. These new meters can be read online, which will ultimately eliminate the need for utility company employees to go door to door reading power meters. However, there are advantages for consumers as well as for the utility companies.

The most important advantage of using smart meters as far as consumers are concerned is the ability to access much more detailed information about their energy consumption. Rather than simply providing information about the total level of power consumption, a smart meter allows consumers to see not only how much energy they’re using in their home, but how this energy is used. This is data which homeowners can act on to reduce their energy consumption, essentially putting control over their energy bills back into their hands.

These meters provide detailed information on usage by time of day, which allows consumers to identify their household’s peak usage times as well as the rates assessed during these hours. Better still, consumers can identify how much energy particular appliances are using, alerting them when appliances aren’t operating at optimal efficiency so that they can have these appliances serviced or replaced as needed. Software is now available for users which automatically send text messages with customized information on their energy usage, so there’s no need to be out of the loop as far as energy efficiency is concerned.

While consumers will need to hire an electrician to come out and install a smart meter in their home in areas where local utilities do not provide this service, the savings which the average household could realize from using these sophisticated power meters should make this a worthwhile investment. Smart meters are clearly a growing trend and in the near future, they will be even more useful as newer energy technologies like solar and wind power become more common, since they are ready to work with these power sources.

For instance, with a conventional electricity meter, it would be necessary to have an electrician come to your home to install a new meter if you were to install a wind turbine or solar panel on your home. A smart meter, however, is able to seamlessly integrate with the new power source; which is yet another reason that budget-conscious and environmentally minded consumers are starting to take a serious look at smart meters.

LED Technology is not just about efficiency, power and light color temperature. Luminous flux performance over lifetime and color rendering index, accordingly the spectrum, are important as well. A lot of people recognize cheap LED versions in any shops or retail stores that seem to be bluish and illuminate the space quite palely.

The manufacturing process is accompanied by variations in material and action itself. The results are white light LEDs with different characteristics. Binning systems have been introduced to support the performance of LEDs and LED products. Binning is focusing on LEDs chromaticity (light color) or luminous flux (brightness) and can be described as the grouping of the LEDs into samples with the same or closest light color or brightness.

LED Light Color – Binning System.

In a nutshell, recent studies tested different compositions of lighting spectra and found an influence on human condition. People who are sensitive to their surroundings tend to complain about headache, dizziness and even nausea when exposed to imbalanced spectra. Long term exposition is even expected to have a negative impact on human health. When buying LED light sources, retrofit kits and products have a look at the CRI or spectrum. The more balanced, the better for the people working under it.