Landscape lighting can add beauty to your home as well as provide increased safety on your property.  Lighting design can be used to light pathways, highlight your homes architecture, and deter intruders.  When considering adding lighting to your landscaping, it is important to find the right balance of lighting.  Focus on adding lighting to main activity areas like driveways, entrances, pathways, dark areas around windows, and stairs and main focal points such as fountains, trees, or statues.  The following landscape lighting basics can help make the most of your lighting.

Up-lighting: Up-lighting is placing a light facing upward toward an object to illuminate it.  This works well for highlighting the focal points of your landscape or home.  Use it sparingly to highlight objects around your yard like statues, trees, flag poles, and fountains.

Down-lighting: Down-lighting is used to illuminate large areas.  It works well for illuminating entertainment areas such as a patio or a deck.  It also helps to deter intruders.

Accent Lighting: Accent lighting is an excellent choice for lighting paths and stairs by placing lights along both edges of a path or a staircase.  This looks beautiful and has the added safety feature of helping prevent people from tripping and falling.  Accent lighting can also add focus to low-lying flowers, shrubs, and ponds.

Saving energy is a laudable goal. By using less electricity and other energy around your home, you reduce your contribution to environmental degradation and climate change. On the other hand, easy and reliable access to electricity is in large part responsible for the high standard of living that most Americans enjoy. Read on to learn more about the intersection between comfort and energy consumption, and how you can cut back while still participating in modern 21st century life.

Energy Consumption and GDP Go Hand-in-Hand

When it comes to residential households, cheap power allows us to run the electrical work that lends so much convenience and comfort to our day-to-day lives – refrigerators, air conditioners, lights, computers, televisions and much more. On a societal scale, access to fossil fuels and the energy potential stored within is what has made possible so many technological and logistical advances in the first place. However, as the years advance, the science is becoming ever more clear – excessive carbon emissions are causing the planet's climate to change, often in destructive and unpredictable ways.

Of course, no one wants to go back to the days of pushing a plow behind a donkey and churning butter by hand, either. The big question, and one that may become existential, is whether we can decouple our energy consumption from our standard of living. Historically, consumption and GDP have risen together in lock-step. Can the United States and other developed countries figure out how to break the chain?

Decouple Lifestyle from Consumption

A recent report by the Energy Collective tells us that “reductions in energy intensity is arguably our most important tool to achieve a sustainable energy future.” What does it mean? That we can get the same or more production out of less energy usage. In some ways, we've already made progress – between 2007 and 2013, energy consumption dropped 4.5 percent in the United States, while the Net Domestic Product continued to rise.

That's all well and good for the country, but what about your household? The same principles apply – for a more sustainable future, look for ways to get the same results with less energy use. That means switching to efficient appliances, like Energy Star certified equipment. It means replacing old incandescent light bulbs with modern LED models. And look for little changes that can make a big difference, like adjusting your thermostat a few notches up or down to reduce the load on your HVAC equipment.

Make a Difference in Your House

You can do your part to cut down on your energy use while still enjoying the amenities of modern life by making targeted efficiency investments and simple behavioral changes. If you need tips on how to reduce your energy bills without reverting to stone age-style living, or need any other electrical work, contact a reputable electrician today.

If the motor seems to be fine, attempt to reconnect it to a load. For motors spinning in the wrong direction that are three-phase, swap any two leads either in the starter or in the motor connection box to reverse its rotational direction. Motors that struggle with a load may have something plugged up or jammed in the load itself. A mechanic may be required to check fans, belts, or pumps that are powered by a motor. When a motor trips the overload device, attach an anmeter to measure the current during startup and operation. Check the FLA on the motor nameplate to see what the expected current draw should be. If it is high, the motor may simply be overloaded. If not, the overload protection device may be set too low or may need replacing.

By following these basic ac motor troubleshooting tips, any electrician can quickly determine the cause of most problems in an AC motor.