Repairs and Maintenance
Illuminations Lighting Design is chockfull of electrical engineers, extraordinary award-winning designers, and top-rated electricians. You won’t find a more diverse, skilled, innovative, and talented team anywhere in the business. We’re well-appreciated in the state, and have the testimonials to prove it.
Being well-loved is lovely, but one of the many reasons why that is so is because we care about your safety. Finding faults and fixing them has endeared us to many customers. So much so, in fact, that people contract with us annually to handle all their repairs and maintenance issues. After all, do you want to haul out a 15-foot ladder to change a remote ceiling light bulb? Probably not…
Better yet, they can call us when they detect a problem, and we can get it handled before it becomes a threat. We take that responsibility very seriously.
That doesn’t seem right…
Consider the light switch for the basement that always makes an electrical arc sound when you turn it on or off…that’s scary! Sometimes you don’t even want to touch it! Well, we can’t blame you for being worried because that is a legitimate fire hazard and it needs to be fixed.
How about the circuit breaker that keeps tripping for no known reason? Say you turn on your microwave oven and (only sometimes) halfway through the cooking cycle the circuit shuts off… What caused that? Is the circuit so close to maximum capacity that the breaker overheats and trips to prevent a fire? Or is it someone else in the house, turning on a television in a distant room that is inappropriately connected to the same overloaded circuit?
Electrical Mysteries are Important Mysteries!
Electricity is a wonderful servant allowing us to accomplish miracles like putting a person on the Moon, creating the Industrial Age, microcomputers, and even the Internet—but electricity is a terrible and dangerous master.
Think of it as your water supply. If that started to leak, it could damage your property and destroy things. We wouldn’t hesitate to get that fixed (even on a Sunday with an extra $100 call-out charge from your plumber!) because the damage is immediate and obvious.
Why are we less anxious to get an electrical problem fixed? An electrical “leak” from a poorly installed system, or something that merely has aged badly, is more dangerous than a flooded basement. It is invisible, poised to strike without warning—so if you do get a warning of some type, that is when you need to take action!
Warnings
Warnings come in all sorts of forms including sounds, like arcing, whines, buzzing, or humming; smells like ozone, burning plastic, or smouldering wood; sights, such as changes in brightness or flickering; or feel, such as a perceptible difference in temperature around a switch plate or electrical outlet, or a tingling in your fingertips when you lean against the sink and touch the toaster at the same time.
DIY vs. Professionals
An amateur installing a new electrical outlet, or even replacing an older one, might innocently reverse the wires. The electrical outlet will still work, but now the “wrong” side of the appliance can still have power even when it is shut off.
This is the reason that electrical appliances have one blade larger than the other—so that something can only be plugged in one way. Even is some Neanderthal breaks off the grounding pin for a three-prong plug, it can still only be plugged in when it is adequately polarized.
Look at a table lamp with an E27 socket (the “Edison” socket for a typical light bulb) for example. The bulb screws into the socket touching the “neutral” or “safe” part of the socket first, and when the bulb reaches the bottom, it makes contact with the “hot” or “powered” portion.
The bulb itself doesn’t care which way the electricity flows. It works fine either way. The key feature is that the part of the socket closest to your fingers is unpowered and conducts no electricity even it is plugged in and turned on. You could still reach inside the socket and hurt yourself by touching the “hot” contact at the bottom, of course, but incidental contact with the top part is safe. The electrical code accomplished that by making a wider blade which is always supposed to be connected to the neutral side so that part remains unpowered.
Getting back to our do-it-yourself electrician, however, if the wires were reversed, that lamp is now a deathtrap for some unsuspecting
user—or any electrical appliance plugged into that DIY outlet ever again, at any time in the future. Such a simple error, yet so deadly!
The Takeaway
You have probably encountered the expression “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” before. People who think they understand “how electricity works” can do incalculable damage with the most trivial errors.
If you have a suspicion that something is wrong with your electrical system, it is most definitely not a good time to call your nephew or niece who is “really smart,” and “knows all about technical things,” to fix it for you.
It is time to call the professionals at:
We are experienced, licensed electricians who will do the job properly—to assure that you and your family are safe—and all without emptying your bank account! Since there are so many ways do a job incorrectly, we urge you to call us, because…
We’ll do it right!
We would love to hear from you, so pick up the phone and give us a call at 713-863-1133 or toll-free at 800-863-1184, so you can learn more about our excellent company before we begin your journey towards enduring home safety.
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