Whether you’re doing industrial wiring or residential wiring for electricity, you’ve got a complex task ahead of you. Needless to say, industrial wiring is essentially a much more complex form of residential wiring. This article will assume that you have some elemental electrical wiring knowledge or aptitude, and it will simply provide you with a very basic overview of what you need to understand with regard to residential wiring and industrial wiring.

It will be up to you to look up your local building and electrical codes for your home or office space. Also, check your local laws to see if you are even permitted to do your own amateur wiring before you proceed. Above all things, approach any wiring project with this knowledge at the forefront of your mind: “electricity can be deadly.” Put your safety ahead of all other concerns.

Red wires and black wires are usually “hot”. This means that there is a current (amps) flowing from the circuit breaker to the electrical box or the appliance in question.

The white wires usually are “returns”. This means that they allow current (amps) to flow back to the circuit breaker after the electricity has passed through the load or appliance in question.

White wires should not be connected together with ground wires, with the exception being back at the circuit panel bus bar. If you fail to observe this rule, then every single time the load is energized (such as turning on an appliance), electricity will flow through the ground wire and the return wire simultaneously. This is very dangerous.

A ground wire is usually bare and attaches to an appliance’s frame. Under normal circumstances, current should not be passing through it. Only when there is a short circuit should electricity pass through the ground wire; this happens so that the circuit breaker will kill the flow of current to the site or appliance.

Smart industrial wiring is based on 3-phase electrical power. 3-phase electric allows less workload to be placed on each wire involved while at once allowing them to work together to give you maximum results. With 3-phase electric, the wires are smaller and the motor is smaller than a typical single-phase motor. These factors allow greater efficiency and longer lasting motors and wires.

There are four types of 3-phase electrical power:

No matter which type of 3-phase electrical power you choose to use, you’ll need a voltage meter in order to determine the actual voltages that are available to you. The type does not determine this.

Industrial wiring typically runs through metal conduits, armored cable, or a raceway. These enclosures are the safety ground–never the neutral wire.

The above information should give you a nice guidepost for doing more research into and getting more practice with either residential wiring or industrial wiring. Again, safety comes first!

Many backup power systems rely simply on a single source of energy for emergency power.  Whether it’s a backup power generator, a backup battery system, or solar backup power, the system is usually flawed because all of your emergency power is resting on a single source.  If we’ve learned anything from Murphy’s Law, it is that a single backup plan has the potential to easily fail in your time of need.

In order to have a truly reliable backup power system, it must have several options for recharging in the event that one or more of your power sources fail.  Here are some of the recharging options available to easily integrate into your Indoor GeneratorTM backup power system:

Clearly, having recharging options at your disposal for backup power systems will be essential to their success.  Among these options, solar backup power is perhaps the most reliable, convenient, and clean.  However, the other options are certainly viable as well to ensure your backup power system is able to maintain power indefinitely.

If you have yet to install a backup solar panel to recharge the backup power system in your home or business, contact a reputable Dallas electrician to take care of the job correctly.

There are many reasons and advantages of LED street lights over HPS, Metal Halide, and any other HID light used in the street lighting industry. These advantages of LED street range from cost savings, higher quality of light, and overall better efficiency.

LED is quickly becoming the “go to” light for all uses; residential, commercial, and industrial. From fully replacing and retrofitting LED is seriously becoming the majority within the world of lighting. The following list is going to cover 4 major advantages of LED street lights over HPS and Metal Halide, hopefully it shines some light on the true benefits of LED for even Metal Halide, you get results that show LEDs actually really do pay for themselves. If you use your lights often, making the switch to LED street lights may even pay themselves off within a few years.

If you’d like to see how much you could save, check out the diminishes over time. This is a highly important thing to note because with greater lumen depreciation comes added costs of maintenance.

Lighting fixtures such as HPS and Metal Halide have lumen depreciation that happens much earlier in their life and much quicker throughout the bulbs life. Whereas an LED takes a longer time to start depleting in it’s lumen output and much slower lumen depreciation than HPS and Metal Halide does.

While not all LED suppliers and manufacturers, MyLEDLightinGuide.com offers LED fixtures and retrofit kits that can produce at a very high MyLEDLightingGuide retrofit kits can run as high as 151 lumens per watt. While the typical retrofit kits on the marketplace (on average) run at only around 110 lumens per watt.

This is just a prime example of how powerful lumens per watt can be. The more lumens per watt you get, the less watts you will need to produce the same amount of light.

So, let’s compare the “average” retrofit kits compared to a Metal Halide light. Remember, the “average” retrofit kits run at around 110 lumens per watt. Compare that to a Metal Halide light that runs around (on average) 90 lumens per watt.

So just by these numbers we can start to see the power LED lights have and how they need less watts to produce the same amount of light that a HPS or Metal Halide light does.

In addition to #3 on this list, LEDs also provide a higher quality of light measure by the Color Rendering Index (CRI). Here’s two images that should do the talking:

Street Light Conversion From 400W Metal Halide to 120W LED using a LED Retrofit Kit (before)

As you can see after the 400W Metal Halide was replaced by the 120W LED fixture, the light produced is much brighter and illuminates a greater area. On top of that, it is using way less energy (400W down to 120W)!

Brighter and greater illumination can greatly increase safety and reduce crime by the simple fact of being able to see more throughout the night. Better illumination also creates safer roadways by not leaving any dark spots that may cause issues for drivers during night time driving.