Electrical Health: Safeguard Your Home or Business
Have you ever thought what would happen if the majority of your home’s electrical components stopped working? This would cause significant issues for you and your family – potentially life-threatening — depending on what stopped working and for how long. Therefore, regular maintenance and making improvements to your electrical service and components is not only important, but it’s necessary.
Your Electrical Health Checklist
- ▫Wiring: Outdated and old wiring puts you and your family at risk for an electrical fire. Wiring is hidden behind walls and insulation. Damaged or old wiring that has become exposed can result in a fire when in contact with the insulation. Updating your home’s wiring protects you and your family from a potentially catastrophic outcome.
- ▫Electrical Service: Outdated electrical service is just as serious as outdated wiring, since it often cannot handle your home’s current electrical load. An overloaded electrical service can result in overheating and fire. One of the benefits of updating your home’s electrical service is that it will reduce your utility bill. But, the most important reason of all for updating your service is keeping you and your family safe.
- ▫Surge Protectors: Lightning strikes, power outages, and “tripped” circuit breakers are just some causes of strong surges that can disrupt or damage your home and/or the applications and components within it. Installing a whole-home surge protector, or adding surge protectors within the home, ensures that your home and it’s applications are protected.
- ▫Outlets: Outlets are often overlooked. However, it’s important that your outlets are inspected to ensure they are updated where necessary with GFCI receptacles for safety and shock or fire prevention.
- ▫Energy Efficient Appliances & Applications: Did you know that 30% of your electric bill is made up of the energy your electrical appliances use? Major appliances such as your HVAC system and water heater, can eat up a lot of electricity and make for costly utility bills. Upgrading to energy efficient models will help cut costs and lessen the load on your electrical system.
- ▫Standby Generator: Standby generators provide your home or business with immediate power during a power lines failure. Installing a standby generator prevents many problems resulting from lack of power, such as throwing out a fridge full of food, thawing frozen pipes, clearing a flooded basement, or replacing damaged appliances from a power surge.
- ▫Smoke Detectors: The placement and operation of your smoke detectors is extremely important in keeping your family safe in the event of a fire. Many new homeowners simply make sure there are batteries in them and trust they’ll work when they need to. But, having your smoke detectors hard wired is a simple upgrade that will protect your family 24/7 without the worry that your battery has failed.
