4 Reasons You Might Need Residential Rewiring During Renovations
A quick tour through South Florida will find charming neighborhoods filled with classic older homes. Instead of tearing down and rebuilding, savvy homeowners are renovating their existing buildings, saving money while keeping the unique Florida flavor. A lot of these classic older homes are structurally sound and mostly need cosmetic work, but it’s always a good idea to look at the wiring during a renovation. Residential rewiring isn’t just for putting plugs in more convenient places; it can be needed for many different reasons.
Increased Use
When many of these classic homes were built, entertainment included evenings around the radio and playing cards at the dining room table. With today’s increased electrical use, you’re pulling huge amounts of electricity through a system designed for minimal loads. Compare the electrical usage in the 1930s with today’s mega refrigerators, air conditioning, computers, and gaming systems. You’ll see why all but the most casual summer cottages are in the need of a rewiring job.
Older Hardware
Your older South Florida home may have been state-of-the-art when it was built, but it’s probably sadly out of date. Older electrical hardware is more likely to burn out, short out, or become a fire hazard than newer equipment. A quick search through your home during the renovation process can find some clues that your equipment needs replacing.
- Fabric covered wires instead of today’s modern vinyl or plastic coated variety
- Bakelite wall switches
- Ceiling lights with pull chains
- Electrical outlets with only two plug holes
A Fuse Box
One of the biggest clues that you have an older electrical system is that you have a fuse box instead of a modern circuit breaker. Fuses prevent electrical overload by burning out, just as a circuit breaker does when it flips a breaker, but they require replacement every time they blow. If your system is old enough to have fuses, it’s likely they’re blowing out often, because you’re using much more power than the system was designed for. Make a circuit breaker part of your residential rewiring to ensure your system is rated for safe usage.
Outdoor Living
Seventy years ago, outdoor home use usually meant sitting on the porch after dinner or letting the kids play in the yard after school. Now most South Florida homeowners consider their backyard as another room in the house. It’s great for entertaining, with barbecues, pools, and fire pits, and often used as an alternate dining room for many months of the year. With all these additions being done to the home, you’ll need lots of extra electrical wiring and outlets to handle it. From outdoor lighting for dining as well as security, to pool filters and landscape lighting, your residential rewiring job probably includes quite a bit of work outside of the house itself.
Read MoreLED Lighting Benefits
Traditional incandescent and halogen bulbs are fading away, and being replaced by LED lights. Business owners may balk at replacing all their bulbs with the new style, because they originally cost many times what the older bulbs did. Such a large outlay will be worth it, in the long run. LED lighting has a number of benefits over the old traditional bulbs, and your business can profit from all of them.
Savings
LED bulbs can save your business hundreds of dollars a year in a surprising number of ways. Most obviously, they use significantly less power, so your energy usage will go down immediately. They’re much more robust, so if they’re dropped they’re more likely to bounce than break, saving wastage and breakage costs. They give off a much cooler light, not heating up the immediate area like incandescent and halogen bulbs do. In steamy South Florida, that means lower stress on the air conditioning unit. LED lights last up to 40 times as long as a traditional bulb, or longer, meaning you may not have to replace any of the original bulbs we install for many years.
During Operations
Unlike traditional bulbs, manufacturers can produce LED bulbs in a rainbow of colors very easily, making signage and emergency lighting economical and bright. They will instantly turn on and off, and when hooked to a dimmer switch they can be dimmed to a wide variety of levels. Unlike ordinary fluorescent and halogen lights, LED bulbs have no problem working in the cold. The three weeks out of the year that combine to serve as winter here in South Florida will have absolutely no effect on any of your bright business signage.
Make it Green With LED Bulbs
Environmentally aware business owners will love LED lights for their tiny impact on the environment. Unlike halogen bulbs, LEDs contain absolutely no dangerous mercury. They reduce energy usage, lowering your business’ carbon footprint immediately. LEDs don’t give off any UV radiation. Every little bit helps when it comes to global warning, and LEDs reduce the amount of CO2 given off from your lighting by up to 90 percent. The long life of these bulbs, combined with the low breakage figures, means that there will be much fewer bulbs filling up local landfills.
Aesthetics
The way your business looks is important if you deal with the public, and LED lighting can give your business a clean and modern look that clients will notice. The availability of multiple colors of lights gives you the option of building signage in a rainbow of hues, as well as installing task lighting in attractive pink or soothing blue shades. Their small size means they can be embedded into sidewalks for unobtrusive lighting at night, while their relative brightness means you can replace older general room lighting with cheaper but better looking task lighting. LED is colorful, versatile, and simple to adapt to any lighting situation. As a business owner, it’s worth spending a little more now to reap the benefits for years to come.
Read MoreHow to Save Electricity
Turning your business a little greener is good for the environment, but it has the added bonus of giving your business hundreds of dollars in electricity savings. Decreasing your power usage gives you a lower bill, and one of the simplest ways to do this is to adjust your business’ lighting. Make a few simple changes and you’ll save on lighting, enough to pay for the changes themselves in just a few months. In the meantime your customers and clients can feel good, knowing they’re frequenting an environmentally aware business. These handy tips will help you learn how to save electricity.
Lighting After Hours
There’s a fine line between security and wastage when it comes to keeping the lights on after your business is closed. If you don’t feel comfortable leaving the building completely dark, install strategic LED lights to lighten crucial areas, and make sure employees turn out all other lights when the business is closed. Consider installing a timer to turn out all the lights after a certain time of the day.
Save on lighting the outside of your building by replacing your old floodlights and security lights with motion sensor or infrared lighting. The lights will only be used when needed, as well as alerting people around the building that something is wrong.
It’s the Simple Things
Often small actions can make big changes. This is true for ways to save on lighting as for anything else.
- Clean your signage. Dusty and dirty signs look dimmer, plus they cause excess heat to build up, using extra power.
- Change your décor. Paint the interior of rooms lighter so they look brighter inside. Make it a policy to open blinds or drapes during the day to let in sunlight and reduce the need for interior lighting.
- Change your bulbs. Incandescent and halogen bulbs use much more electricity than newer fluorescent and LED bulbs. Change out all the bulbs in your business and you can see significant savings.
During Working Hours
Of course you have to keep the lights on during working hours, but you can still find significant savings by making a few simple changes and enforcing good habits with your employees. Consider installing a skylight to let in more natural light, as well as lighter blinds instead of darker curtains. Allow as much natural sunlight as possible to flow into the building. Install a dimmer switch in the main work area to reduce the amount of electricity used without completely turning out the lights.
If you have work areas that are not in constant use, install a motion detector on the lights to make sure no one leaves them on all day. Encourage your employees to turn off all lights that aren’t in use, from outdoor landscape spotlights to the lights in the bathroom when they aren’t being used. Timers and motion sensors can give you big savings on lighting in every part of the building that isn’t in constant use.
Read More
Recent Comments