If you’ve ever watched the show “Holmes on Homes” on HGTV, you’ve likely seen the problems associated with old or faulty wiring.  Mike Holmes tends to get very agitated by safety issues, and for good reason.  Each year, over 40,000 homes suffer fire damage due to home electrical problems.  These electrical fires account for hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries.  And what’s the main culprit?  Old wiring!

If you live in a classic home built before 1940, chances are you have old wiring in the house.  You may have knob-and-tube or Romex wiring, both of which can become brittle over time.  The insulation dries out and starts to crumble, causing the inner wire to become exposed. The cloth insulation around the wire deteriorates with age and eventually becomes unsafe.

But perhaps one of the biggest threats of Romex and knob-and-tube wiring is that these types of wires aren’t grounded.  That means if one of your appliances shorts out, you could become the path to the ground for the electricity.

Even if your home is only 20 or 30 years old, you could still experience electrical problems at home due to a lack of capacity.  Most homes built more than 10 years ago are not designed to handle the amount of electronics we use today.  Think about it:  if your house was built in 1980, it was built before home PCs and laptops and HDTVs and surround sound and all of the other toys and gadgets we use today.  These appliances can draw a lot of power, and your current electrical wiring may not be up to the task.

If you own one of the one million houses in the DFW area that’s more than 20 years old, it’s a good idea to have a licensed electrician come out and take a look at the wiring.  He or she can make sure that your house will be safe and productive for many years.

There are many possible reasons your lights may flicker from time to time:

Because there are so many possible causes for flickering lights, it is best to have a licensed electrician inspect your electrical systems to determine the exact cause, especially if the problem persists. Depending on the nature of the problem, there could be the potential for additional issues to arise if it is ignored.

Give us a call today so we can help keep your home safe and in working order.

Everyone wants to save money.  With the economy, still slow and unemployment high, family and business budgets are tight.  Thus, we’re all looking for ways to lower our bills, and there aren’t many bills more devastating to budgets than the electric bill.  Not to mention those bills during a brutal Texas summer.

At the same time, people are finally beginning to understand that the damage we do to our environment is harmful in the long run, and are trying to find a way to reduce our impact on the planet.  A lot of the time it seems like we must choose between saving money and helping the earth.  That is simply not the case when we’re talking about options for lighting your home or business.  The employees of my Plano electrical service tell you that you can actually do both at the same time, and that it‘s as simple as changing a light bulb!

Light bulb shopping has changed a lot in the last ten years.  Our choices are no longer limited to the incandescent (and sometimes halogen) bulbs we all grew up with.  Today fluorescent CFL lights are available in almost every store, and LED lights are starting to become more widely available as well. These bulbs use far less energy to create the same amount of light, which ultimately means less energy you have to pay for.  The savings can be seen with a single bulb.

For example, if you replace just one 60-watt incandescent bulb you use four hours each day with a 12-watt LED equivalent, you’ll wind up saving almost $10 a year on average! These bulbs can save you money and hassle in ways you might not think of at first.  For instance, LED and CFL bulbs produce very little heat when compared to an incandescent bulb which means that they don’t attract insects, and that your air conditioner doesn’t have another heat source in your house to cool down.

There are electrical benefits to having cooler bulbs too: less heat being generated by light bulbs means that there’s less heat stress being placed on the sockets and fixtures they’re attached to.  Less stress on the fixtures means that they have a much longer life, and that you’re saving money you’d otherwise have to spend on repairing or replacing them.

All these choices beg the question of which type of bulb is better.  From an electrician’s view, they’re both superior to the old kind of bulbs.  Personally, I think LED lights are superior to fluorescent CFL lights right now.  The technology that makes CFL bulbs work is still primitive.  Think of what cell phones looked like in the 1980‘s compared to today; right now, the CFL bulbs you can buy are the fluorescent bulb version of those old brick phones. LED lights have very distinct advantages:

These reasons are why I generally recommend LED bulbs; they’re more earth-friendly, easy to dispose of, use less energy than even CFL bulbs, and last a very long time.  They can be more expensive than other bulbs, but you’ll save enough money on your power bills in the long run to come out well ahead!