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The job of an electrician is more than helping keep lights on in homes and the TV running. It’s more than putting in new light fixtures and setting up smart home systems. One of the critical jobs of the electrician is safety. Many of the electrical repairs in Montclair, NJ that our licensed team handles help to prevent electrical fires, high voltage shocks, and other dangers.
Below is a list of common electrical hazards in your house and how you can avoid them:
At the beginning of summer, we wrote a post about the differences between a fuse box and a breaker panel. It’s important for a homeowner to know what type of electrical panel they have, since outdated panels have trouble handling the electrical load in modern homes.
They can also be safety hazards.
If you know you have a fuse box in your house, you may have asked yourself if it’s creating a dangerous situation. We won’t be alarmist, but fuse boxes are certainly less safe than an updated electrical panel. We recommend all homes with fuse boxes arrange for electric panel services in Montclair, NJ to have updated breaker panels installed to replace the fuse boxes. It’s better for electrical power in the house—and safer as well.
The leading cause of electrical fires in homes is from the insulation around electrical wires—particularly older wiring. Because of the increased demand placed on wires in due to the larger electrical load of newer appliances, older wires can become too hot and cause the insulation to catch fire. These fires can quickly spread to building materials.
You may need to call an electrician in Nutley, NJ to extensively rewire your house to improve its safety. Below we’ve listed some of the ways to tell that you may need rewiring. Pay close attention, since a proper rewiring reduces significantly the chance of a house fire.
Outlets in a home are something we tend to take for granted. We don’t often think of outlets wearing out with time, but this is exactly what happens. No electrical device can last forever, and you probably put a large power demand on many of your home’s outlets. (For example, how long has that one light been plugged into the same outlet? Years?) Outlets can break, and when they do they have the potential to create hazards. When you have broken outlets, call Anderson for electrical repair in West Orange, NJ as soon as you can.
The answer to the above question is: “Sometimes no and sometimes yes.” Lights in your house that start to flicker can indicate minor issues you can correct yourself or which an electrician can fix, but aren’t a source of major worry—except for losing light in a few bulbs.
On the other hand, flickering lights can warn that there are bigger electrical faults in the house, some potentially dangerous. These problems absolutely require a professional electrician to repair. Never attempt to do any wiring or panel repair on your own, since it can create larger fire hazards and a high danger of electrical shocks.
There are homes of many different ages in Northern New Jersey, ranging from the newest in residential construction to vintage homes more than a hundred years old. This means there’s also a range of residential electrical systems. One of the major jobs we handle as electricians in Nutley, NJ is helping to upgrade antiquated electrical systems like knob-and-tube wiring to modern standards, as well as putting in the newest in safe outlets (GFCI and AFCI).
This brings us to the central hub of a home’s electrical system. The fuse box. Or the breaker panel. We see both in homes and we want to go into more detail about the differences—and why we recommend upgrading to a breaker panel if you have a fuse box.
You can expect to change the standard incandescent light bulbs in your house every 2–3 years depending on how often they’re used. Most of these bulbs can burn for around 900 hours. LED light bulbs can last for much longer, sometimes only needing to be changed every 8–11 years. But no light bulb will last forever.
But what if the light bulbs in your house are burning out far sooner than they should? Such as maybe less than a year, or lasting only a few months. You might have problems with the bulbs, the fixtures, or even your home’s electrical system. We’ll go over some of the reasons for short-living light bulbs below and what you can do about them.
In our last post, we wrote about the importance of making the upgrade from old two-prong outlets in (ungrounded outlets) to three-prong outlets in your home. We also offered suggestions about the best types of outlets to have installed to improve safety.
Today, we’re looking at a specific reason for improving the outlets in your house—to make your house safer for young children. Standard open outlets can present serious hazards to children who may attempt to place objects or their fingers into the slots, and they can also create fire dangers. Most outlets are at ground level, making them easy for children to access. If you have infants and toddlers in your home, or you have a child on the way, we recommend you work with electricians in Livingston, NJ to have the safest types of outlets installed.
We urge all our customers to investigate ways to update their household electrical systems. This isn’t only about making sure you’ve got enough power for all your new appliances and the increasing number of charging stations. It’s also about safety. We specialize in updating old homes with modern wiring, electrical panels, and outlets.
One of the upgrades we recommend is replacing standard three-prong outlets with GFCI and AFCI outlets, which improve safety. But let’s go one step lower and take a look at two-prong outlets, which many homes in the area still have. (Two-prong is standard for homes built before 1960.) You can stick adaptors onto them so they work for three-prong plugs, but we don’t recommend this. We’ll explain why it’s best to change out those old two-prongers.
Homeowners are always looking for ways they can save on their utility bills. Upgrading to LED lights is frequently recommended as one of the best ways to do this.
LED (light-emitting diode) lights do cost more to have installed than standard incandescent lights, however. This causes some people to balk at making the upgrade. Are LED lights actually worth the initial cost of the upgrade?
The simple answer is “Yes!” Although LED lights may not be the ultimate solution for lowering your energy bills, they have many benefits to offer and will pay back their increased costs many times over. Below we’ve listed some of the reasons why working with an electrician in Nutley, NJ to switch to LED lights is worthwhile.
