They have their ups and downs…
The word chandelier comes from Old French and means “candle-holder.” Long before electricity, a chandelier was one of the brightest sources of illumination possible, so naturally, we folks at Illuminations Lighting Design find them absolutely fascinating.
Designs have varied over the years but early ones were simply circular objects like a wagon wheel, or ship’s wheel with candles a
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Illuminations Lighting Blog
Power Conditioning
What you need to know
Household voltages can vary widely depending on many conditions. One of the chief contributors to that variability is aged powerlines, ancient transformers, and what exactly stands between you and the power station. At Illuminations Lighting Design we are very familiar with the infrastructure of Texas.
In some locations, you could share a power source with a nearby factory district (even i
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Residential Lighting Maintenance
The porchlight has gone again!
What is more annoying than having a beautiful, oversized, chain-suspended, antique carriage light on your double-height front porch suddenly burn out? Good grief! It is 15 feet in the air… You don’t even own a ladder that big. Worse yet, you’re having a party this coming weekend and everyone is going to notice…
Well, there are worse things… Half the lights in the reflecting pool
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Landscape Lighting Consultants and Designers
Making it your own!
The Story of a New Home
Who doesn’t love finding the perfect home? We’ll spend weeks or months going from place to place, looking for something that fits our image of perfection.
Finally, you find precisely the right number of bedrooms, a
beautiful spacious kitchen, a fully finished basement, complete with home theater and luxurious seating, and a perfect bar for entertaining close frie
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Residential Electrical Service
Be safe…not sorry!
It is almost stunning to think that a little over 100 years ago electricity was still rare. Only wealthy people had electricity in their homes. By the time we got around to building the Empire State Building in 1930 (the Great Depression was still going strong), most commercial buildings had acquired electricity, and coal-gas lighting was being eliminated from street light fixtures.
When ele
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Cabinet Lighting
Updating, Repairs, and Maintenance
There is a lot to be said for the brave artist who first puts a brush to canvas. Defiling that pristine blank area with any color seems like hubris of the highest order.
Once s/he has made that incursion, however, it's too late to turn back, so continuing is the only choice. Making that first mark doesn’t merely give permission, but instead requires that one proves that there w
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Whole House Surge Suppression
Protecting Everything you Own
As electricians, highly qualified installers, and mostly as electrical engineers it would be ridiculously easy to talk glibly about Multi-layered Varistors, Gas-Tube Suppressors, Metal-Oxide Varistors, and all sorts of things that are outside of the experience of most homeowners.
Although such information is technically correct and useful, it is inappropriate. In politics this is
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Art Lighting, Repairs, and Maintenance
It’s a complex skillset
Some folks might think that "art lighting" is easy— clamp an elongated tube-style incandescent fixture to the top of a picture frame, and you're done, right? Sadly, no; that went out of fashion years ago, right along with button-up shoes.
The technology has advanced from the power-hungry, short-lived incandescents invented in the 1890s, to durable sources that use 1/10th the power, and las
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Led Lighting Upgrades and Conversions
Once upon a time, there were dozens of scientists around the world, all seeking to make an electrically sourced form of illumination. Some of the earliest were arc lights, of the sort that produce those powerful beams you see sweeping across the sky to attract attention to a car dealership having a sale.
A couple of decades ago they were used to announce the premiere of a new movie so that people could find the
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Neatness Counts
No mess… and we vacuum, too!
Back in your school days, on top of the requirements for a test or quiz, your teachers would often add “…and Neatness Counts”. At the time we might have regarded that as unfair since knowing the answers might have seemed hard enough. The teachers, however, were preparing us for Real Life, because neatness really does count.
Just like Home
It’s true that we know all our fixtures intima
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