Throughout the years, we’ve added many great Father’s Day gifts to our extensive selection of LED products. Because the list is constantly growing, we decided to narrow it down to our top 10 best-selling gifts for dad. Our ideas range from LED products for task, leisure, and work lighting to vehicle LED bulbs and strips. They’re long-lasting, energy-efficient, and are sure to brighten dad’s day.

You will be spending a lot more time indoors over the next few months as we ride out yet another winter. You will want to do what you can to ensure your family is as safe as possible inside your home. There are a few things you can do today to provide an extra layer of safety. Your Beverly Hills electrician is here to help you. You can count on the team at The Electric Connection to provide you with a knowledgeable, experienced electrician to take care of the following safety features for your home.

• Replace your old, standard outlets in the kitchen and bathroom areas with GFCI outlets. These are designed to cut the electricity the second the circuit is interrupted. These outlets are especially handy in areas where water is present, like the kitchen and bathroom. If an appliance is accidentally dropped in water, the breaker will trip, cutting off the electricity and reducing the risk of electric shock.

• Have hard-wired smoke detectors installed. These smoke detectors rely on your home’s main power rather than a battery. Dead or missing batteries in smoke detectors are often to blame for late warnings in the event of a house fire. The detectors are all interconnected so when one goes off, the rest of the alarms are sounded. You will need the installation completed by a professional electrician. Beverly Hills homeowners will feel better knowing the wiring was handled by somebody trained to work with electrical wiring.

• Carbon monoxide detectors are also handy devices that every home should have. If you use natural gas for your heat or have a woodstove, a carbon monoxide detector can warn you to unsafe levels of carbon monoxide in the home.

Your home is somewhere you should feel safe. These rather easy and inexpensive safety features can eliminate some of the risks in your home. Give The Electric Connection a call today and schedule your safety enhancements.

Summer colors are abloom with table and floor lamps, wall lights, ceiling light fixtures and fabulous wall décor featuring the finest in stained glass and quality finishing from Meyda Lighting.

Choose from all new Meyda Tiffany designs or build your own craftsman style fixtures and customize decorative stained glass lamps; Meyda Lighting offers the finest in stained glass light fixtures, wall art and home décor.

For over 36 years, Meyda Tiffany has delivered top quality stained glass with a magnificent assortment of table and floor lamps, ceiling pendants, wall sconces and decorative accessories.

Named for its founders “Meyer” and “Ida,” Meyda Tiffany took root when Meyer Cohen built a stained glass window for his wife Ida.  What began as a hobby turned into America’s leading and oldest manufacturer of custom and decorative lighting.

Still a family-run business, Meyda remains committed to providing top quality Tiffany-style products, representing a wide range of fashions from traditional to eclectic.  Through a series of strong cooperative relationships with several small handicraft workshops overseas, Meyda’s designers work closely with quality stained glass studios to ensure a superb finished product.

Ever-expanding to offer luminous and brilliant lamps and decorative accessories, Meyda recently acquired Quality Bent Glass Company (QBG). The originator of many notable stained glass concepts, including the famous Coca-Cola chandeliers, QBG has been seamlessly incorporated into the Meyda Tiffany family.

Meyda utilizes QBG’s original tools, molds and techniques to create nostalgic lighting products much like those offered at Tiffany Studios in NYC in the early 1900’s.

With the purchase of Mecco Art, a metal art studio, Meyda Tiffany further expanded their range with state-of-the-art equipment and novel manufacturing techniques to produce spectacular custom crafted lighting and décor under the Meyda Custom Lighting brand.

Under Meyda Lighting Brand, thousands of decorative styles are offered throughout fine home lighting and home decor dealers in the United States and Canada.

The works of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Dirk Van Erp, Gustav Stickley and other outstanding masters inspires many of Meyda’s lighting designs.  Artistic compositions include Arts and Crafts light fixtures, as well as Rustic, Gothic, Revival and Contemporary lamps and decor.

Meyda’s extensive line encompasses outdoor lighting, too. Wall sconces, stained glass windows, fireplace screens, billiard/kitchen island fixtures, and novelty items are also featured in their repertoire of stylized lighting and home décor.

The creative energy at Meyda is astounding, as new styles and magnificent colors in hand-painted glass continue to enchant and illuminate with the utmost in elegance and sophistication. Meyda continues to implement one of the industry’s most extensive product development programs.

Whether you are searching for a bit of nature in sunflowers, wisteria and dragonflies or a hand-painted flush fixture reminiscent of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” Meyda Tiffany will delight your senses with eye-catching illumination.

Special order or choose from a grand selection of table lamps, floor lamps, ceiling pendants, flush fixtures, and wall lights.  Opt for a Tiffany-style table lamp or custom design your signature stained glass kitchen island light with Meyda Tiffany. Now available at 1800lighting.com, Meyda Tiffany is blooming with new summer colors.

How many light bulbs have you changed in your lifetime? It’s a simple action, and often one that we don’t put much thought into, but what if the simple act of changing a light bulb could make a profound impact on the environment, and the well-being of future generations?  As experienced www.EnergyStar.gov:

“If every American home replaced just one light bulb with a light bulb that’s earned the ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light 3 million homes for a year, save about $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent 9 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year, equivalent to those from about 800,000 cars.”

Think about the changes that you can make by simply replacing the outdated incandescent bulbs in your home as they burn out with one of the Alternative Lighting Solutions below. Here are some details on a couple of the most popular Alternative Lighting Solutions available.

Compact Fluorescent Lamp: Modern CFL bulbs for use in homes consist of a curved fluorescent tube and electronic ballast in a single unit, designed as a direct replacement for standard blubs. They use 3-4 times less power than comparable incandescent bulbs. These are great options to replace your standard light bulbs, but they do have a few small drawbacks. According to an article by PopularMechanics.com, while CFL’s do have a much longer lifespan than standard bulbs, they often lose some of their brightness long before their expected lifespan is up, and this is increased in fixtures that don’t allow for efficient cooling of the ballast located in the base of the bulb. Another documented fact about CFL bulbs is that they do contain mercury, which means that they must be disposed of properly by taking them your local approved recycling center. You wouldn’t throw a battery out with the daily trash would you? So you shouldn’t throw these out either.

Light Emitting Diodes: LED’s are a form of “solid state” lighting that have become available recently to homeowners as an incandescent and CFL replacement. Using small light emitting diodes mounted directly to circuit boards, these are highly efficient, and have fewer parts prone to failure, allowing for an expected realistic lifespan of 20,000 to 30,000 hours, when operated at recommended temperatures. While initial costs for these bulbs are higher than incandescent and CFL options, long term energy savings are where this alternative lighting option truly shines, with the average LED bulb using approximately 12-17% of the energy that it takes to run an incandescent bulb of similar output, the end result is a bulb that costs drastically less to power over time.

As a point of comparison, here is a simple chart of the energy usage of LED and CFL bulbs compared to incandescent bulbs, and the output associated with them:

Lighting technology has changed a lot in the past decade, and it is pretty amazing to see what could be on the horizon for future lighting innovations. Take this for example. While most homes will never need this amount of output, it’s pretty impressive to see that something the size of a Christmas tree light, like this plasma bulb, can put out more light, more efficiently, than the giant bulbs that we use in street lamps!

The great thing about these changes is that they aren’t something that requires a huge change in your lifestyle, so they are some of the easiest ways possible to help the environment, and lower electric bills while you are at it!

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