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Serving the Buffalo Area since 1995
When it comes to the electrical systems in our homes, the phrase “up to code” is often thrown around. But what exactly does it mean for your electrical system to be “up to code,” and why is it so crucial? In this blog post, we’ll explain the basics of the National Electrical Code (NEC), explore how it works on a local level, and help you understand why having a licensed electrician in Amherst, NY is essential for keeping your home compliant.
Because we live in an area with many vintage older homes, it’s essential for residents to pay attention to the heartbeat of their houses: the electrical wiring. If your home has weathered more than four decades, it’s time to consider the condition of its wiring. Outdated electrical systems can pose serious risks, from potential fire hazards to compromising the safety of your family. This guide will walk you through the signs of outdated wiring and when it’s prudent to contemplate an upgrade, which may require whole-house rewiring in some cases.
Small electrical problems may seem like nuisances, but they often point toward much larger issues with a home’s wiring. Damaged or aging wires can lead to major emergencies like fires if they aren’t addressed. If you have wiring trouble in your house, it’s critical to have the problem addressed right away—and not as a DIY project! You’ll need professional electricians to come to your house to examine the wiring, identify the problem, and have it safely repaired.
If you notice any of the warning signs of wire trouble below, call our licensed electricians for electrical repair in Orchard Park, NY that will ensure your house stays safe and stays powered.
Residential electrical technology continues to march forward, and that means out of date older systems. In many cases, you won’t need to worry about technology in your house that’s a couple of years old. But you may need to worry about technology that’s several decades old!
We’re going to look at four outdated types of wiring and electrical panels we find in many homes. We recommend our customers have these replaced or updated.
We offer many important services to upgrade the electrical systems of homes throughout Western New York. Since the area has so many vintage homes, there’s a large number of houses with wiring decades out of date. Not only do these antiquated wiring systems have trouble handling modern electrical loads, they can create fire hazards.
If you have a home built before 1980, we recommend contacting our electricians to inspect your house and see if you need electrical wiring and rewiring in Depew, NY.
There are two specific cases of outdated wiring common in New York that we recommend fully upgrading: aluminum wiring and knob-and-tube wiring.
Summer is approaching, and we can almost guarantee it will be a more enjoyable one than last year! But summer brings with it some major electrical challenges for a home. Households use enormous amounts of electricity during summer. For some homes, such as those that rely on gas-powered heaters, summer may have higher electricity use than winter—and the hotter the summer, the more electricity consumption rises.
We’re experienced with dealing with summer electrical problems. Below we’ve listed a few of the most common electrical troubles you may run into this summer.
We haven’t written the end of this story yet, and we’re hoping to give it a happy ending. If you live in the vintage house and it’s the one with the bad wiring, you can write the upbeat ending yourself by calling us to help you with vital Clarence, NY electrician services.
A home has two hard-working “circulatory systems,” plumbing and electrical. Because both are mostly hidden from view even as they do essential work, it’s easy for a homeowner to dismiss them as something that will last as long as the house does.
But that’s not the case. When it comes to electrical wiring in Orchard Park, NY, you do need to have concerns about the age of the wiring. Not just for as long as you’ve been in the house, but for as long as the wiring has been in the house, period. If you live in a vintage home and the wiring has never had an update, it’s important to know about how long the wiring can expect to endure.
What does it mean to have your house grounded? We could go into some lengthy engineering explanations about how electricity works, but we can provide a simpler discussion of the electrical flow in your house. Electricity is always trying to “ground,” which means it gets rid of all its negative energy so it can get back to being balanced. In your home, the way the electrical systems allow electricity to return to ground is through the neutral wires. The “hot” wires carry the negative half of the polarized charge of electricity, and the neutral wires contain the positive half. These wires run next to each other through your electrical system.
For an example of this standard grounding at work, look at an outlet. One slot is the “hot” side, and the other is the “neutral.” The current flows through the hot side and then into the neutral side to eliminate the negative energy.
The standard for major electrical appliances since 1969 is to have three-pronged plugs. Soon after this standard was introduced, the household outlets started to change over to three-prongs. A three-pronged outlet is a grounded outlet. The third prong, the one below the “hot” and “neutral” slots, is the “ground.” The ground slot is there to protect a person from receiving an electrical shock from the metal casing of an appliance because the electricity from the hot wire side is sent into the ground in case there is excess. You’ll notice that some appliances still use two-prong plugs because they don’t have large metal cases in them that can create this problem.
This lengthy explanation about grounded outlets and three-pronged plugs is necessary to get to the big question, “Is it okay to use a three-pronged adapter?” The cheater plugs allow you to plug a three-pronged plug into a two-pronged outlet, which you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. If you live in an older home with two-pronged outlets, you may have plenty of these cheater plugs around. Is this a good idea?
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