We may not notice it, but a lot of consideration and hard work goes into parking garage lighting. Parking garages are hazardous zones, and several trades work together to make architectural and electrical components safe and economical. 

I’ve asked Phil Barr, Electrical Division Manager of Kalos Services, to share some of the things he considers when installing parking garage lights. He has recently worked on parking garages in Cocoa Beach (84,000 sq ft), Gainesville (280,000 sq ft), and Celebration (380,000 sq ft).

NOTE: The images in this article are NOT of the parking garages Kalos has worked on. They belong to the public domain or have been credited as required. The images selected merely illustrate the points we are trying to make.

What considerations go into parking garage lighting?

Parking garages have a unique set of hazards. People operate dangerous motorized vehicles inside of them, and there is a sharp contrast between the light of day and the darkness of a shaded garage. The transition must be easy for people’s eyes to prevent accidents.

You can’t grab whatever light you see in a brochure and put it in a parking structure. Each structure is unique, and you have to consider factors such as glare, photometric geometry, and how many foot candles are produced at each time of the day.

The main goal of parking garage lighting is to illuminate the structure, but safety remains the top priority. Construction crews must do whatever is in their power to prevent accidents. Poor adjustment to lower light and glare are two major causes of collisions in parking garages.

Lighting at entryways

Since most parking garages are used during daylight hours, drivers go from driving in very bright conditions to dark conditions. Drivers will not be able to see well when they enter a structure. They could collide with other drivers or pedestrians.

We always need a higher photometric footprint at entryways during daylight hours. When you enter a parking garage with brighter entrances, it takes less time and effort for your eyes to adjust to the darker conditions. 

The opposite is true at night. Parking garages should have a lower photometric footprint at entryways so drivers won’t be blinded as they enter a lit structure after driving through the natural darkness of night.

Reducing glare

Nowadays, many American parking garages use LEDs. While they are bright and energy-efficient, LEDs are notorious for glare problems.

Some suppliers have taken on the effort of reducing glare. Many manufacturers have introduced double refraction/reflection fixtures that produce little or no glare. Still, there are measures that electricians should consider as well. 

In a buildings.com article, Dr. Eric Woodroof of ProfitableGreenSolutions says that electricians must insist on shielding the LEDs. Most LEDs come with a total internal reflection (TIR) optic, but electricians can still request a shielded option to reduce glare further.

Photometric geometry

Photometric geometry is a fancy word for the shape of the lighting distribution. Most parking garages’ lighting illuminates down and out (the U.S. Department of Energy calls this a “batwing” distribution). There are cases where some upward illumination is necessary, such as when there is signage near the ceiling. 

The shape of the lighting distribution is also going to affect the spacing of the lights. Batwing distributions with wide ranges of light at the bottom won’t need to be very close together. Lights with round or near-vertical illumination are not ideal in the first place, but they must be placed relatively close together if they are used at all.

Natural lighting and photosensors

Even though electricians are responsible for introducing artificial lighting, they have to factor natural lighting into their work. Natural lighting is renewable energy, and it can reduce energy costs.

Natural lighting varies with the time of day. For example, windows on the east side of a parking garage will bring in more light on that side of the garage during the morning. In the evenings, the windows on the west side of the garage will bring in more light.

It’s possible to reduce the photometric footprint during certain times of the day. Photosensors can darken or shut off lights if they detect enough natural light. These are great safety features that can also save a lot of money.

Controls for safety and energy conservation

At Kalos, we install parking garage light fixtures with a few different controls to promote safety and save energy. The main types of controls we use are photosensors to detect light levels, motion sensors to detect movement, and programmable control panels to control lighting schedules.

We’ve already discussed what photosensors do, but we’ve only given a brief explanation of how they work. Photosensors measure the ambient lighting, and they dim the lights accordingly. During the day, their brightness may fall below 38% of their full potential. At that rate, the goal is not to completely illuminate the garage but supplement the natural light coming in. Sometimes, the ambient light reading will be high enough to shut the lights off completely.

Motion sensors are quite similar to daylight sensors, but they detect movement within the garage. These mostly exist for energy conservation rather than safety. After all, it makes little sense to keep the lights on when there aren’t any moving cars or pedestrians inside the garage. When a vehicle or person enters the garage, they’ll trigger the motion sensor, and the lights will turn back on. 

A manual control panel may also be the way to go in some scenarios. We can program control panels that can turn the lights on or off, depending on the client’s needs. These don’t require any fancy sensors. The lights can be powered off manually if a parking structure will be vacant for long periods.

Common mistakes

We’ve just discussed the technical elements of parking garage lighting at length. You would think that the most common mistakes would deal with installation, but the top mistakes are surprisingly personal.

In Phil Barr’s experience, most mistakes happen because different tradespeople fail to communicate properly. They make false assumptions about the scope of the other trades’ work. “Research, research, research,” he advises. “Study plans, specs, and submittals of not just your own trade, but also every other.” Since several trades come together during parking structure construction, each subcontractor should access the other trades’ blueprints and materials. It is unwise for an electrician not to familiarize themselves with the other trades’ documents.

On a similar note, another common mistake is failing to ask questions early on. The biggest mistake is to build a job on assumptions rather than facts, so you can’t just assume that you know everything about the job. If you’re unsure about something, ask the other tradespeople or the general contractor for a specific answer. Even if you think you know everything, challenge it. Go back and make sure that you understand the entire project and have not made a faulty assumption about your work or anyone else’s.

Things that we’ve learned over the years at Kalos

Just like our previous section on common mistakes, most of the things we’ve learned over the years have been personal. Phil Barr has mostly learned about communication and project coordination rather than hands-on construction.

With so many project stakeholders, it takes real skill and self-evaluation to coordinate with them meaningfully and deliver what the client wants. Communication is less about figuring out what you want to say than determining how the listener needs to hear it. Each person is different, so electricians must learn how to adjust their communication style.

Emotional intelligence and superior communication skills are not obvious keys to success in the electrical industry. However, those are some of the top traits that Kalos looks for in potential apprentices. Our leaders try their best to demonstrate those qualities and nurture them in our employees and subcontractors.

Whether dealing with the technical or interpersonal side of parking garage construction, lots of consideration goes into planning and installing lights. Even though parking structures may have a stigma for being dark and spooky, electrical teams work hard to make those structures as safe as possible. 

The next time you enter a parking garage, pay attention to the lights. Notice how they supplement the daylight and adjust as people walk and drive through it. The parking garage probably won’t seem so dark anymore; it may even fill you with awe if you think about the union of architecture, engineering, construction, and electrical work that went into the garage’s creation.

The post Lighting in Commercial Parking Garages appeared first on Kalos Services.

However, electricians are the ones who understand the conditions of the equipment and space. Their knowledge informs the design process and benefits teammates in other trades.

We have put together some tips that electricians consider when planning and laying out electrical rooms. The tips and codes mentioned in this article were outlined by Phil Barr, leader of Kalos’s Electrical Division.

Understand the room and its boundaries

Electrical rooms are usually tiny for a reason. The building owners and managers aren’t trying to offend electricians or make their lives harder by giving them a small working space. 

Building owners aren’t making money from those rooms, so they try to maximize their profit by keeping as much open commercial space as possible. While their rationale won’t make the electrician’s job easy, it’s good to understand the working space and determine how to make the most of it. 

Even though there’s a good chance that the electrical room will be small, there are different considerations for new and existing rooms. If you’re working with a space that already exists, you must think about the present boundaries. There may be lighting in the room that you need to work around and leave ample space for. 

If you’re building a new room, we recommend knowing the exact equipment you plan to use early on. That way, you can have an accurate idea of your clearance and dedicated space for a room that doesn’t exist yet.

Communicate with everyone on the project

Designing an electrical room is a team effort where several trades come together. An electrician will typically work with engineers, architects, and a general contractor. Each person brings different knowledge and experience to the table.

The electrician is the one who’s probably the most knowledgeable about the practical elements of the job. They know their electrical equipment and are likely familiar with the codes they must follow. 

It’s up to the electrician to communicate their knowledge with the other trades as issues arise. That way, design changes can be made as early as possible. Don’t wait until the last minute to voice your concerns.

It’s also not a good idea to deviate from the original plans without seeking approval first. Keep team members in the loop at all times and get your suggestions approved.

Consider the ampacity of your equipment

The ampacity of your equipment dictates quite a few of the safety features of your electrical room. 

For example, equipment of a higher ampacity requires outward-swinging doors with panic hardware or dual entry/egress to the space. That requirement will affect the architect’s design. The electrician should let the other trades know about the equipment’s ampacity and required safety features early on.

Ampacity also partially determines how many means of egress you will need in an electrical room. The higher the ampacity, the greater the risk for serious injury. If the equipment is over 6 feet wide and has over 1200 amps, the room needs at least two means of egress.

Plan your means of egress

Egress is the ability to leave a room. Doors are the only means of egress in electrical room planning. 

We design egresses for safety, which is why many electrical rooms have multiple doors with panic hardware. If someone gets injured on the job, it should not be difficult for them to leave the area and seek help. 

The idea is that an impaired worker shouldn’t have to fumble around for an exit and risk further injury. An egress should always be within reach.

Mind the other systems in your space

The electrical room isn’t just for electric systems.

The electrical room will likely have mechanical systems that you will need to be aware of. Ventilation systems may also be necessary within the space. You will need to include these things in your plans.

It’s also not uncommon to see fire sprinklers in electrical rooms. You’ll need to keep that in mind when you’re configuring your dedicated space. You usually need at least 6 feet of dedicated electrical space between the equipment and the structural ceiling. Nothing can be in that space. Anything above that space is fair game, though.

Be prepared to protect your electrical equipment from sources of water with drip pans. Electricity and water make a deadly combination.

When you consider the other systems and work around them, it will make it easier for you to lay your conduits out and make space for your overhead wires. You can keep everything tidy as you work, making the equipment and its parts easier to access later. 

Be sensible about clearance

Typically, the minimum working clearance will be 3 to 3 ½ feet from the leading edge of the equipment. There may be exceptions to the rule where you will need more working clearance. 

In some cases, the minimum clearance may double to 6 or 7 feet. Doorways may also affect your working clearance, so consider the impact of your egress placement. 

Working clearance also factors in the width of the equipment. In general, the minimum width will be 30 inches. Placing panels next to each other can give you more room. The minimum clearance has to be 30 inches across the entirety of the equipment. The individual panel lengths can be less than 30 inches as long as the sum of all panels’ widths is above 30 inches.

The most important thing you can do is be mindful of the clearance codes and plan your electrical room accordingly.

The key to planning electrical rooms is to avoid assuming that everyone on your team knows the equipment and clearance codes. Electricians fill in the knowledge gaps during the planning process. 

When everybody shares their ideas and concerns, laying out a safe electrical room can be a relatively seamless process.

The post Planning and Laying Out an Electrical Room appeared first on Kalos Services.

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Links and Items Mentioned In This Video

• Atomic theory
• Potential difference
• Lenz’s law
• Electromagnetic theory

Transcript

So, today’s class is going to be on basic electrical theory. Even before applicable theory, I want to go through a little bit of atomic theory, going over what electrons are, protons, and those types of things. So, let’s go ahead and do that.

[Video Playing 1]

Narrator: Back to the small, where we begin our climb up the ladder of structure. This is how we represent an electron visually. The particle itself is a fundamental particle, and it’s too small to be seen by any imaginable instrument of observation. So, we instead represent the properties that allow the electron to interact. The central small dot represents the weak charge of the electron. This charge, entirely separate from electric charge, gives rise to the weak nuclear force. This force causes radioactive decay.

[Video 1 Paused]

This guy uses a lot of really fancy words, but don’t focus on the really fancy words. Focus on a lot of the visuals that he gives. The visuals are really good. He’s kind of impressed by some of the fancy words that he says and works on.

[Video 1 Playing]

Narrator: And its typical range is much smaller than the diameter of a proton. The larger volume of shifting purple is meant to represent the electric charge of the electron. This charge is the generator of the electromagnetic force, which has infinite range, although the drop-off of strength is pretty dramatic as we move away from the electron. The electromagnetic force is how electrons interact with other electrically charged particles and with magnetic fields. These interactions make the structure of atoms and molecules possible. This gives rise to almost all of the complexity that we see around us.

This is our depiction of a proton. It is composed of two up quarks and one down quark, as you can see from the tiny rings of color near the center of the quark. The overall charge of a proton is positive, and so we have given it a gold shell. Note that we can simply add the charges of the individual quarks to get the charge of a proton. Oh, protons taste sour, like vinegar and lemonade.

This is our depiction of a neutron. It is composed of two down quarks and one up quark, as you can see from the tiny rings of color near the center of the quark. The overall charge of a neutron is neutral, so we have given it a silver shell. Note that we can simply add the charges of the individual quarks to give the charge of the neutron.

The red, green, and blue colors of the quarks represent the color charge, which generates the strong nuclear force that holds them together. It comes in three different charges, represented here by three colors, and for different colors the force is attractive.

The mediator of the strong force, the particle that is exchanged in an interaction, is the gluon. We represent gluon exchange as the occasional wispy strain between the quarks. As you can see, gluons have color themselves, and each gluon exchange causes the quark involved to swap color. Although we show quark motion inside of the neutron as leisurely, they’re actually traveling close to the speed of light.

There are two kinds of quarks that are found in normal matter. Physicists call them “flavors” of quarks. These quarks are the up quark and the down quark. A proton is formed from two up quarks and one down quark, while its slightly heavier cousin, the neutron, is formed from two down quarks and one up quark. The red, green, and blue colors of the quarks represent a property that attracts them to one another. It is this color charge property of the quarks that hold them together in a proton or a neutron.

These protons and neutrons can then combine to form the nucleus of each element from the periodic table. One proton in the nucleus makes hydrogen; two form helium; six, carbon; eight, oxygen; 79 is gold; and 92, uranium.

Neutrons help hold the protons together. Because of their electric charge, protons would repel each other more strongly if neutrons were not present, and the heavier elements would come apart. There are approximately as many neutrons in each element as there are protons.

Atoms are formed when the positively charged proton and nucleus capture the negative electrons. Neutral atoms capture one negative electron for each positive proton in the nucleus. So, hydrogen has one electron to go with its one proton; helium, two electrons; carbon has six; oxygen, eight; gold has 79; and uranium, 92. They are nearly 90 stable elements. The largest of them contains close to 800 fundamental particles joined in a complex but stable structure.

But electrons cannot just gather around in a crowd. Once again, the strange wonderful world of the tiny has its idiosyncrasies. Electrons arrange themselves in shelves inside an atom like the layers of an onion, and only two electrons can fit per layer, so the more electrons an atom has, the further away from the nucleus the outer shells must be, and that means these electrons are more loosely held.

[Video 1 paused]

I want to say real quick about that, that scientists always try to explain things like that. Like for example, he said, “Only two electrons can be held in each one of these rings.” He doesn’t really know why. He’s just saying that that sort of been observed, but even then, you can’t see an electron, so they really don’t know what they’re talking about. What they’re trying to do is they’re making laws and principles in order to explain why what they observe actually occurs. So, they say things like it’s absolute when really, it’s just kind of what they come to based on theory.

[Video 1 playing]

Narrator: It is this difference in how title electrons are held in each different kind of atom that determines the chemical properties of the element. This accounts for the ability of metals to conduct electricity, the aloofness of noble gases, and the formation of molecules. It turns out that protons and two or more different nuclei can sometimes capture and fight over the same electron, and when that happens, atoms of different elements are joined together to form molecules. This oxygen molecule is sharing two of its electrons with two hydrogen atoms. This is how a water molecule is formed.

[Video 1 stopped]

The reason why I showed you a highly scientific view of what electrons are and what atoms are is to make it clear that it’s really not simple, and that’s important because the way that I explain it is simple or is simplistic in thinking. He starts by talking about quarks and how protons and neutrons are made up of different types of quarks and things. Well, if no one has ever seen an electron, they’ve certainly never seen a quark. It’s essentially a theory that they’ve developed that works, and they can apply it into science, but even when you break it down to that level, which is still a very simple level compared to quantum theory, it’s still very complex, and it has nothing to do with what we interact with on a day-to-day basis.

Basically, what I want you to understand when I say “an electron,” you’d know that an electron’s true nature is not really known. You don’t really know that much about an electron. So, I give examples of how we see them work in day-to-day life. All that he was talking about there is this idea of building opposing forces onto each other and the attraction and repelling nature of opposing forces. This is the very core thing that I always come back to when you’re thinking about basic electrical theory. Really, we can call it a negative force, we can call it a positive force, we can call it whatever, but it doesn’t matter what you call it. The concept is that this wants to go there, these two want to go towards each other, or these two want to go away from each other.

A good way of thinking about forces in a simplistic way that we all observe is you take a stone, you drop it, and it falls. One way of saying that is, “Well obviously, gravity means that what goes up must come down.” That’s a simplistic way of saying it, but really, energy tends towards equilibrium is another way. It’s the way I like to say it. So, for example, if you have a big container of water, a big jug of water here, and you poked a hole in it, that water is going to travel out because gravitational force and atmospheric pressure are forcing it out of the container. But what’s really happening is that it’s tending to a state of greater force to lesser force. Because of all the forces involved, it’s wanting to go to a state of equilibrium. Because you can think of it this way, let’s say that instead of it going on the ground, there’s a tank here full of water, and then there was another tank down here, and they both had water in them, but I put a hose from one to the other.  Well, it would fill up this tank until the two levels or these two tanks if they’re all set at the same level, and it would stop. The reason is that you have this natural equilibrium that occurs.

Another example of equilibrium and energy would be if I took an ice cube and I set it on this table, and this room is 75 degrees. What would happen to that ice cube? It would melt, and then once it melted, it would be what on the table?

Audience: Water.

It would be water, and then it would continue to warm up until it came to what temperature?

Audience: 212.

75 degrees.

Audience: Actually 74.

Well, I guess 70, but it will achieve an equilibrium with the thermal energy around it. So, it gets to that point the minute it doesn’t keep getting warmer. It just maintains its equilibrium. And so with atomic theory, we’re really always talking about the same thing. We’re talking about things wanting to attract each other and things wanting to repel each other. There are these forces at work, and like forces tend to want to repel each other, and opposite forces tend to want to attract to each other. There’s a song that talks about that. I’m sure Nathan knows it.

Audience: Yes.

Would you care to sing it for us?

Audience 1: He probably could.

Audience 2: Oh just a little.

Audience 3: Come on.

Nice, Paula Abdul. I wasn’t sure who it was. Thank you for enlightening me.

Audience 1: I wouldn’t mention that.

Audience 2: Who’s that?

The other force, electrodes. There’s a typo. Anyway, so, they tend towards equilibrium. That’s the important concept to understand.

[Video 2 Playing]

“The Flow of Electric Charge”

Here. There. Everywhere.

Narrator:  Imagine you are shuffling on a carpet and reached out to touch the doorknob, and zap! You get a mild shock. What’s happened is the friction between your feet and the carpet has produced a large buildup of negative electric charge on your finger. This creates what is known as electric potential difference or voltage between your finger and the doorknob.

V = V_B – V_A

electric                        electric potential                   electric potential

potential         =          at location B               –                       at location A

difference                       (finger)                                  (doorknob)

(voltage)

Narrator:  If the electric potential difference is large enough, a sudden flow of current, called an electric discharge, will occur.

[Video 2 paused]

Notice how they said negative electrical charge. So, you build up a negative electrical charge, and then when you touch the doorknob, it zaps you.

Audience:  [Unintelligible] is angry. Is that why it’s negative?

Well, that’s an interesting thing because, in science, electrons are given a negative charge. But what they are talking about in many cases is an actual loss of charge, and so from a differential standpoint, you actually have fewer electrons, and there’s a greater number of electrons, and then it zaps you. The electricity goes this way. Well, actually, it would be the opposite. So basically, it could mean either, and it really doesn’t matter. What they’re really saying, and I always like to point this out because they say you have a negative electrical charge, is that it wouldn’t matter. Either way, as long as you have a differential electrical charge from that of a doorknob, there’s going to be a shock when you touch the doorknob because it doesn’t matter if the electricity is traveling from your finger to the doorknob or from your doorknob to the finger. It doesn’t matter. From that standpoint of how much it’s going to shock you or the amount of arc. I always just find that kind of humorous how they always like to attribute what type of charge it is, when really, what you’re talking about more accurately is which direction the energy is flowing. Is it flowing from-to or to-from? And this makes it all the more confusing by the fact that in science, an electron is given a negative charge when you can think of an electron as being the positive charge.

[Video 2 playing]

Narrator: While this can be in the form of a zap to your finger, it also happens on much larger scales in many different places. In fact, violent electric discharges are responsible for some of the most spectacular displays of sudden energy releases on earth and in space. Let’s look at one other example that you might have come across in, say, an auto body shop or at a construction site. Between the welder’s tool and metal, there is a large electric voltage. This causes sparks to fly and ultimately for a strong electric current to flow. In turn, this generates a brilliant light display and enough heat to melt the metal and allow it to bond to another metallic surface.

What about electric discharge on even a larger scale? One form of electric discharge that many of us have witnessed takes place during a violent storm in the form of lightning. In massive storm clouds, the friction between large particles composed of many atoms builds up a large separation of electric charge and creates voltages approaching 100 million volts. With such a big voltage, things can get explosive, and the energy is released as a lightning bolt.

[Video 2 paused]

The reason why I like this one is for the reason that it talks about the concept of potential difference, and it explains some of the common places that we see it. The term “potential difference” is a term that is used to explain voltage, or when people talk about voltage differentials, sometimes, they’ll call it potential difference. It’s a really good word to know in order to have a good grasp of basic electrical theory. You can say the word “voltage.” Sometimes, that comes to mean electricity itself to us. Like, we’ll say, “There’s a lot of voltage to it,” but really, we don’t know what we’re saying. Whereas potential difference is a word that actually explains itself. And so, it’s the same way of saying, “Okay, the difference between this counter and an ice cube is not as great as the difference between an ice cube and molten metal bar. There’s a greater thermal difference between a molten metal bar and an ice cube than there is this desk and an ice cube.” We understand that difference right because we measure that in degrees. Well, when it comes to electrical potential, what we’re really talking about is the difference in electron charges between two objects, and it doesn’t matter what they are. It can be the earth and the cloud. It can be, in the case here, between this arc welder and the base metal being welded. There’s a great differential in the charges between these two, and that’s all due to electrons. But the differential in number in one of the electrons and being outside of all these atoms at the very core level. It’s just important to understand that the reason why this arc is jumping from the welder to the metal is because of that differential. In the same way, the heat energy is transferred between the ice cube in this room and the ice cube and the metal bar or the two vessels of water that had a difference in height. We understand it better in other contexts sometimes.

Getting right into the specific understanding of how we get that to occur or why that occurs in the first place because, in the case of an electric charge with static electricity, we understand that you grab a ball and your hair or whatever, you jump in the trampoline and for whatever reason, you developed an electrical charge and then you get shocked. Well, we don’t really understand why that happens when we’re thinking about it, but it’s important to recognize that we’re always interacting with different chemicals. We’re always interacting with the different surfaces that have different charges. And practically, the two ways that we see energy generated is through either magnetism or a chemical reaction, which is an electric battery, that sort of thing.

So, before I move on here, I would like to ask this question. This is my favorite example. So, how do you think a nuclear power plant creates energy?

Audience: When particles are fused, they release energy.

Correct. That is true. It’s actually fission. We would like fusion in our plants, but we’re actually splitting the nucleus of atoms through firing neutrons at them essentially and creating this chain reaction that we can control. But what does that actually do? How do we get from that explosive heat-creating reaction to actually being able to pull a switch in your house and actually see lights come on?

Audience: Heats water, creates steam.

Heats water, creates steam. That’s an interesting thing because you think all this super scientific nuclear power plant has to have some super scientific way that it actually creates the power–no. In fact, almost all power generation in the United States is actually coming from steam or some form of a driving turbine. Actually, heating something and then running a turbine and then turning the turbine, and then the turbine does what? The turbine turns big magnets and the magnets induce the magnetic flux into runs of wire. So, the next video gives a pretty good example of how that works.

[Video 3 playing]

Narrator: Electromagnetic Induction.

Can a magnet produce electricity? Let’s explore this. Michael Faraday, the English scientist, was the first person to prove that a magnet can create a current. To test this, he moved the magnet towards and away from the coil of wire connected to a galvanometer. He observed that there was a deflection in the galvanometer, indicating that a current is induced in it.

The current obtained due to the relative motion between the coil and the magnet is called induced current. The phenomenon by which an EMF or current is induced in a conductor due to a change in the magnetic field near the conductor is known as electromagnetic induction.

[Video 3 stopped]

So, that’s all we’re going to watch in that video. This magnet isn’t touching this wire at all. All he’s doing is taking the magnet and just running it up and down, up and down, up and down, and it’s actually creating a potential difference between these two poles. So, on one end, this guy has a galvanometer here. One end connects to one end of the top of the wire, and the other end connects to the other and spools around, and then it runs the magnet up and down through it, and it’s creating a potential difference. He’s calling it EMF. The EMF just means electromotive force. Electromotive force is exactly the same concept, same with potential difference. It’s just a different way of explaining what it’s doing–the force of moving electrons, electromotive force.

But there’s a differential being created between these two by doing that. So, one end to another, there’s flow of electrons from one end to the other.

I like this guy.

[Video 4 playing]

Male Speaker: Let’s talk about where your electricity comes from, how it is generated. And we need to start with Lenz’s Law. First, I have here a rare-earth magnet, a coil of wire, and then a galvanometer. So, this is a measure of how much electricity is produced.  Basically, Lenz’s law is like an old man. He’s trying to fight the change so, if I have a magnetic field that’s increasing, increasing, increasing, currents cannot flow in the loop to fight that change.

[Video 4 paused]

What’s interesting is the way that he talks about fighting the change. It’s kind of the same way of saying seeking equilibrium. It’s an opposite way of saying it, but he is really saying the same thing. What he’s saying is that it doesn’t want there to be this difference. There’s a difference created. There’s something that’s not a state of normalcy, and it’s trying to get back to that state of normalcy.

[Video 4 playing]

Male Speaker: And watch what happens as I bring the magnetic field closer. Notice that electricity is produced. As I bring it away, electricity is produced but in the opposite direction. That’s because as I bring it closer, the magnetic field is increasing, increasing, increasing. Electricity is being generated in this direction to create an opposing magnetic field to fight that change. Now, as I bring it away, now this magnetic field is getting smaller, smaller, smaller, so the electricity flows in the other direction like this to keep it strong, to keep it where it was, to fight that change.

So, let’s take a look a little closer. Now, if I move the magnetic field slowly, not much electricity is being produced, but when I move it quickly, you see a whole bunch of electricity is produced. So, time is a factor, and that has to do with the rate of change or the flux–flux being the magnetic field through this area–how quickly the flux changes. Well, that’s proportional to how much voltage is created, and if you look at the dial closely, I’ll do a quick jerk with the magnetic field, and you see a whole bunch of electricity is created.

Let’s stop for a second and talk about how your everyday use of electricity is created as I spin this magnet in the coil and you see the electricity being generated. Well, take a windmill. A windmill is just something that spins, right? The air spins it, and when it spins, it’s spinning the magnet, which is attached to it, and there’s a coil of wire around it–boom! Electricity is generated. For a coal-fired plant or a natural gas plant, well, you burn it, it creates heat, that steam comes up the smokestack, that steam turns the windmill-type thing, a turbine, if you like, and that has a magnet attached, so the magnet starts spinning in a coil of wire, and look at what happens–electricity is being created.

Nuclear power plant, same thing. The nuclear decays heat up the water, creates steam, turns a windmill, creates electricity. Hydro, the water turns a paddle well attached to a magnet. The magnet spins in a coil of water, electricity is created. This is called the generator, and now we know where your electricity comes from.

Cool, now we know where your electricity comes from or more specifically, how your electricity is created. And we also learned about Lenz’s law–as the magnetic field is increasing and increasing in this coil, well, electricity will flow in this direction, so it generates a magnetic field that opposes that change. Basically, it tries to keep it the same. Now, as I back the magnet out, then this magnetic field is getting smaller, smaller. Electricity is generated in this direction, which creates a magnetic field like this to try to keep it strong in that direction.

[Video 5 stopped]

So, what he is doing there is he is very simplistically trying to explain what’s known in magnetism and motor theory as the right-hand rule, and that’s why he keeps doing this and this because what he’s talking about is when you move in one direction, then the electrons flow in this direction, you can see your fingers like this. And when you move in the other direction, then they flow in this direction, and that’s what he’s kind of trying to show.

Now applicably, why does that matter to us? It’s very useful because there are all sorts of different applications. A couple of really common applications for us in the A/C field would be an A/C contactor. You apply power, potential difference, across the coil. It creates an electromagnetic force and pulls in a switch. So in that case, what you’re doing is you’re using electromagnetic force to create linear motion and pull the switch in, or in the case of a motor, you’re actually running electricity through a coil of wire that’s the exact opposite of this power generation where you’re running electricity through coils of wire and that alternating positive-negative, positive-negative, is causing a rotor to turn inside of a motor.

So, just like in this generator where he’s talking about spinning a magnet inside of a coil, it’s creating a voltage, and you saw when he was doing that, you see how the needle kept going like this and this, back and forth. It’s going from one state of positive charge to this state of negative charge. And again, it doesn’t matter because of the differential from the center point, you see the that needle always ended up in the center. Either way, there’s a flow of electrons, and we always think in terms of there being positive flows, negative, or whatever. But it really doesn’t matter that there’s a differential because you could say, for example, “All right. Well, I was talking about the ice, well, this ice here is going to transfer its heat into the room in order to establish equilibrium.”

Well, what happens if I took that ice and put it in this zero-degree freezer? Well, now the ice is going to transfer heat out of itself into the freezer. It’s the opposite effect of what would happen in this room, and the same is true, and so the same amount of energy may be transferred from what we would think of as being a cold object into a freezer as it would be from in this room to the room itself or from the room to the ice. The same theory or the same principle is true when it comes to electricity; it doesn’t matter which direction it’s flowing as long as it is flowing. And so when we see an alternating current, what we’re seeing is, as that magnet turns, the electricity is flowing one direction and other direction, one direction, and the other direction, and that’s what we see and what we mean when we talk about alternating current.

The principle here is that magnetism creates electron flow and that we see it all the time and in the other direction, electron flow can create magnetism.

[Video 6 playing]

Narrator:  An induction motor is a type of AC motor where power is supplied to the rotor by means of electromagnetic induction. These motors are widely used in house fans, blowers, and many domestic and industrial appliances. They are robust, cheap, and have no brushes. An AC induction motor has two basic electrical parts; a rotor and a stator. The stator is the stationary electrical component.  It is built by putting together iron layers, forming a group of individual electromagnets arranged in such a way that they form a hollow cylinder with one pole of each magnet facing toward the center of the group. Magnetic poles are built by winding clockwise and anticlockwise insulated copper wire. The coils are wound in such a way that when current flows in them, one coil is a north pole, and its pair is a south pole.

[Video 6 paused]

What he’s trying to explain here is that each pair has its own opposite. He’s not trying to say that the entire thing is north and south. What he’s saying is that when this is south, this is north, and vice versa, and so the way that I explain it is, think of a pinwheel. If you have a pinwheel and you want to spin this pinwheel. Well, if you take it and I go around slapping it like this, is that gonna spin the pinwheel?  Now, if I had a bunch of people who are all slapping in time around the pinwheel, and they were just dududududu like this, and then hitting it all in time in order to make it go a certain direction, then that would keep the pinwheel spinning. Well, that’s what this is doing is it’s hitting it with magnetic forces that are opposing each other in order to spin this motor and keep it going. And so essentially, when they show the rotor in there, that rotor isn’t touching the stator at all. The stator is just creating all these different electromagnets around it, and when the electricity flows around it, it’s changing those from negative to positive all the time, causing that rotor inside to continue turning. Does that kind of make sense?

So, we always tend to think in terms of things affecting each other by physical connection. We tend to think that the motor is running because something is driving that motor, but really, that part of that motor that’s turning isn’t actually touching anything. I mean it’s not touching the thing that’s actually causing it to spin. What’s causing it to spin are these electromagnets.

[Video 6 playing]

Narrator: When AC power is connected to the coils, directional flux is created depending on current’s direction and winding direction of each coil. See in this animation how the magnet’s polarity changes every half cycle of the AC power supply, creating an alternate magnetic field.

The rotor is the rotating electrical component. It also consists of a group of electromagnets arranged around a cylinder with the poles facing toward the stator poles. The rotor obviously is located inside the stator. As the magnetic field of the stator alternates due to the effect of the AC power supply, the induced magnetic field of the rotor will be attracted and will follow the rotation. It is a natural phenomenon that occurs when a conductor, aluminum bars, in the case of a rotor, is moved through an existing magnetic field or when a magnetic field is moved past the conductor. In either case, the relative motion of the two causes an electric current to flow in the conductor. This is referred to as induced current flow.

[Video 6 stopped]

He actually got pretty in-depth there about what actually goes on the rotor to actually cause it to be opposite of the forces. But you saw on the rotor, the part where it actually spins, how to release, kind of diagonal, slant magnets in there, and so even the way that the magnets are oriented to each other causes the motor to run in a certain direction, and the spin continues later in the same direction once it gets started in that direction. So, it’s a little bit more complex than simply explaining this rotating magnet or rotating iron cores through the magnetic field. I mean, there’s a little more to it than that, which there always is, like how we started with a super complex atomic theory. Understand that if we were to actually take the motors you see apart, you would find things in there and say, “What is this?” This is in addition to things like what we do with our capacitors and understanding capacitors and induced electromotive force and all those types of things into the rotor play.

So, boiling down to this principle, what we’re doing is we’re running electricity through wires, and that electricity running through wires is causing magnetism, which is then causing this thing to spin. If you make it much more complex than that in the way that you think about it, then it becomes, “Well, I don’t really understand electricity.” But if you take these basic building blocks and then build on it in order to understand the further connection, that’s when we get somewhere.

[Transformers and electricity] is something that I really like to talk about because I find it very interesting. I actually didn’t really fully understand this until very recently. If you’ve ever looked outside of your house, up on if you have a power pole, which I do, of course. So, you have this power pole. Up on this power pole, there is a transformer, and so you see these wires coming in, and coming out of that transformer, there are two wires but really one main wire maybe goes in, and then it goes into your meter box. And then there is a neutral wire down at the bottom, but it’s not as high. You know, it’s not the one that you need to be worried about, but you have two coming out and then a neutral going in. But generally speaking, the one going into your transformer, which is what I was trying to say, is just one main wire, and then a ground. Well, they take that one wire, and then they have two wires going out of that transformer. And when you’re looking at different appliances in your house, you’ll have some appliances that are 120V, and you’ll have some appliances that are 240V. For example, your air conditioner is 240V generally, your plugs in your house are gonna be 120V, your dryer is gonna be 240V, your oven is gonna be 240V.

So, how do you produce this 240V when coming into the transformer before it goes into your house?  You only have one wire. Well, first of all, understand that transformer is an interesting device in that there is no connection between primary and secondary transmission.  So you have this high-voltage power coming into the transformer, and then, you have coming out at your house, a usable voltage 120 and 240V. So, how does it go from being this high voltage to a lower voltage before it enters your house? Well, what it actually does is it uses magnetism. So, you have these wraps of wire on one side, you have a greater number of wraps on the higher voltage side, and then a lesser number of wraps on the lower voltage side that goes to your house. And the magnetism that’s created, there’s a magnetic field that’s created that induces the voltage it creates because magnetism causes there to be voltage flow or electron flow, electromotive force, potential difference, whatever you want to call it. Because you have fewer wraps of wire over here, you have a lower voltage, but again, it’s really that simple. So, for example, if I had 120V coming out, and I have 1200V going in, well, that is a 10:1 ratio. So, that means that there are ten times as many wraps on this side of the wire as there are on that side. You’d think it would have to be more complex than that, but it’s not. It’s just that ten times less wraps of wire, so you get the ten times reduction in the voltage output.

So there’s that side of it, but then how do you get two different wires? How do you bring one wire in and you get two different 240V wires? How do you get two different 120V wires, and how do you get 240V out of that? When it comes to understanding that whole thing about potential difference, this makes 120V and 240V make a whole lot more sense since you have the center line, which represents a state of normalcy.

This is what a 120V sinewave looks like. Really, this representation is exactly what’s created by that big magnet that’s turning over at the power plant. Because over at the power plant, you have this big turning magnet that’s then inducing this voltage into this wire and is creating this sinewave. So, the sinewave that’s being seen at your output is a direct connection to what’s occurring at the power plant, which I always think is interesting. So, you have this that’s occurring at 60 cycles per second. So, from here to here, you have 60 of this per second, which is where we get the term 60 Hertz (Hz). I’m sure you probably heard that before, 60 Hz. Essentially, the power is going on and off 60 times per second, making one full cycle 60 times per second. So, this is 120V, so it goes to peak power and then down to peak power because this is just the most peak power. This is peak power. It’s a difference from here to here. Again, it doesn’t matter which way.

But then at 240V circuit, it’s exactly the opposite. You have an exactly opposite 120V, exactly opposing 120V circuit. So, when you measure from here to here, it’s 120V. From here to here, it’s 120V. But from here to here, it’s 240V because they’re peaking and valleying at exactly opposite mounts.  Now, how does that happen because it starts with one wire going into your transformer? Here’s how it happens, which I think is fascinating: they take the two wires that are going into your house, and they wrap them in opposite directions around the cord. So, you have one going this way, wrapping around, and then you have another one wrapping around the opposite direction. So, as the magnetism is being induced into these wraps of wire going into your house, it’s creating one set of electrons flowing in one direction, you have one set that is going in the exact opposite direction within the same transformer. And so, then it outputs two separate 120V circuits to your house, which is very interesting, and the reason why they do it is for that reason that you can have more safe electricity to use, sort of general daily use in your computer or whatever, and then you have a higher voltage.

Audience: But both of the wires coming out of the transformer are 120 and independent? And then it gets combined in your house on the right grid?

I like to always use water whenever I can and I like to think of electronic flow like water. When I think of electrical potential, for example, I think of your outlet as being little spigots with high pressure, and then you can turn them on, and by turning them on, you allow the electrons to flow. Well, how do we turn them on is by plugging them in, and now you create a path for it to flow.

Because, unlike water, electricity wants to flow from one stage to another through a conductor, not just in the open air the way water can. I can switch it to water here, but in the electron world, this air between us is a great barrier. It’s the opposite. In the electron world, it would be happy to flow through a sheet of metal, a sheet of copper, or something because that would be the equivalent of air to it. But because of that, we don’t have a path. So, creating a path around the circuit is the same. I’m making a gateway by plugging in my plug to that outlet.  So, I’m creating a path or circuit for those electrons to essentially run, and it’s a really simplistic way of looking at it. So, when I create a circuit for them to run from here to here, that’s a 120V circuit. When I’m creating a circuit for them to run from here to here, now I’m creating a 240V circuit.

Audience: Did you explain that the metal section is neutral?

We’ll call it neutral, but really it’s a state of equilibrium because it can be ground too. The reason why they use the word neutral is that it’s neutral. It represents equilibrium. It represents the same way that air represents equilibrium for the ice or the hot metal bar. They work until they give up heat or absorb heat until they reach that state of equilibrium. So, this represents a state of equilibrium, but when you connect a path from here, instead of connecting a path from here to here, you’re connecting it from here to here; now you’re creating a greater differential.

So, how that looks practically is what Jason is saying that when we’re plugging into a plug in your wall, there’s one hot, which is 120V, and then one neutral. When it goes to neutral, that essentially is ground. It’s just an equilibrium state. When you go to a 240V circuit, you have the two opposing leads that are connecting to each other, so they’re hot, but they’re hot oppositely, which is why if you were to go up to a 240V circuit, stick your finger on one of them, I don’t advise that you do this, but stick your finger on one side, and then you grab something metal, it’s going to shock you exactly the same as it would if you stuck it in a 120V outlet in your house. Now, if you took both your fingers and you stuck in both of those sides of the 240 V circuit, now you’re gonna get the full 240 V. Does that make sense?

So, when we talk about potential difference, again, that’s why they use that term. There is potential difference creating flow. So, there’s a greater potential difference between here and here than there is from here to here.

I want to try to define some basic electrical theory terms that you’ll hear a lot, but I’ll do it in a very simplistic way. You’ll hear the terms amp, volt, ohm, and watt. It’s important to understand the difference. If you’re not going to understand anything else, it’s important to recognize that, in most cases where people are talking about electricity, they almost use amp, volt, and watt interchangeably. They’re just saying thatit is electricity, but really, they’re representing completely different concepts–completely different explanations of what’s happening with electricity or electron flow.

So first, I like to talk about these in terms of a highway. Think of a wire conductor as a highway. If I were to stand on a side of a highway that’s in rush hour traffic, and I were to take a picture, and it was just a still shot, and I saw all these cars lined up, and I share it with someone, I would say, “Look at that. That’s a busy road.”  There are a lot of cars on that road.

They’ll say, “Wow. There are a lot of cars on that road.” But these cars may not be moving at all, maybe just been sitting there. They may sit there for hours. I say “Look at all these cars.” Think of the cars on the road like amperage. We’re saying this is how many cars there are at this moment, snapshot, boom, cars. It has nothing to do with how fast they’re going.

In the same way, I could talk about voltage and I could say, I could go there at 2 in the morning and see a guy in a Kawasaki Ninja going 300 miles an hour over the night and it probably can’t go that fast. He’s going really fast. And I could say, “Wow! This road is busy because there’s a really fast guy on this road.” Well, it may not be busy. It’s just may be little one guy in this Kawasaki Ninja going awesomely fast, 300 miles an hour. Remember that.

So, neither really gives you the whole picture. One is telling us how fast the car is going. The other is asking how many cars are there at a given moment–how many cars are there, how many cars are there? So, how many cars are there? How fast are they going? It’s a really unscientific explanation, but it works as a way to kind of help us think about what we’re talking about when we say voltage. So, when we say voltage and amperage, what we’re really saying is velocity, force, that’s voltage. Quantity of electrons, that’s amperage. Wattage is combining the two. How many cars? How fast are they going? So, you could say something like wattage should be like, how many cars are passing at this point per minute. That would be a way of explaining kind of what wattage is.  It’s that overall picture of how many electrons are being moved over a period of time.

Does that make sense? Do you follow me there?

All right, now ohms. What are ohms?  Well, an ohm is the resistance to the flow. So, think of the road, and think of a bottleneck. So you’d say, all right, well, you got the capacity on this road that goes so fast, but then you reach this point and the road get started to get real small so the cars had to go one by one. Ohm represents resistance. So it’s saying how much resistance to the flow of cars is there on this road. And we could of think in terms of an ohm but really, when you’re talking about any type of conductor, any type of circuit, really all that matters is the total resistance of that circuit.

At A/C school, I had my instructor asked us in class. He said, okay, you have extension cords, one is a really big fat one, and one is a little skinny one and you got to run a really big saw at the end of this extension cord. How are you going to hook up the extension cord to get the most of what you got?  You got the big fat one, you got a little skinny one.  Are you gonna put the big fat one plug into the wall and then take the little skinny one, or are you going to put the little skinny one first and then hook up the big fat one? Which one are you gonna do? Any impressions?

Audience:  Fat one first.

Fat one first because that’s what everyone always does, fat one first. Right, and we hook up the fat one first and then the skinny one. Well, the truth is that it makes no difference because that electricity has to flow through that entire path, and so it doesn’t make any difference which you’re going to put first. It matters what the resistance of that entire circuit is. Does that make sense?

And so when we’re talking about Ohm’s law, “I,” this is kind of a funny thing, but “I” is amperage, “V” is voltage, “R” is resistance. So, amperage equals voltage divided by resistance. So, they have a correlating effect to each other so you can work that algebraically, and you can solve for any one of those if you have any other two. But in principle without going into the math of it, because the real world doesn’t apply to the math of Ohm’s law very much, the thing to understand is that the greater the resistance that you have, the less amperage you have. So, in a light bulb, in any circuit, if you apply more resistance to the circuit, you’re going to have less draw on the circuit. You’re going to have fewer electrons moving through the circuit. It becomes strange because I remember when I was working on a heat strip kit, and I had a heat strip kit, and it was drawing a little bit too high of amperage. Soh I said to myself, how am I going to reduce because all a heat strip is just a wrap of fire. It’s just, you know, another electron flow through it and it gets hot and air flows over and it heats air right?  So I thought to myself, I need to reduce the amperage of this circuit. What I am going to do? Well, of course, what am I going to do? I cut some off. Well, cutting some half actually increased the amperage because I reduced the resistance. Now, what’s interesting is that people will often think in terms of greater resistance equals more heat, and so heat–no. That’s all messed-up thinking.

Less resistance equals more amperage. More can flow through with less resistance, and then the voltage is essentially the rate or velocity of the force behind the electrons that causes them to flow through. So, if you have a voltage that’s a million volts, well, then you’re going to get more amperage at the same resistance because the resistance is usually static. Resistance stays the same. The light bulb, you measure it. It has so much resistance, and it doesn’t change. So, fluctuating the voltage will then change the amperage, but if you can fluctuate the resistance, that will also change the amperage. The amperage is kind of more the result of that equation. Well, when you throw in the time quotient, then you start to get the wattage and of the overall picture of how much current is made.

How does this all apply? What does it mean? It is pretty simple, but I could probably give about a 5-hour class on just basic electricity. Applied electricity is about generating electricity, creating paths, and controlling those paths. I like to talk about power generation because understanding power generation, how it’s created in the first place, and understanding magnetism opens up a lot of doors in your mind about why things work the way that they do. But understanding that really what we’re all talking about here with electricity is we’re talking about creating an energy differential and then creating a path for the electrons to get from here to here, and while they get from here to here, then they get their work, whatever it is that they want them to do–whether we want them to generate heat through an electrical coil, whether we want them to emit sound, whether or not we want them to create magnetism and drive a motor or go on a certain way with a magnet with the magnet or whatever. That’s really what we’re saying all along: how do we control the circuit? We can turn it on and off with a switch, opening and closing it or whatever, but we’re controlling this path.

Magnetism has a huge role in electrical generation. Practically speaking, we really only see two different uses of electricity in our day-to-day lives. We see in it resisted flow, which are things like heaters, and we see in magnetic flow. That’s pretty much what we’re doing, and really, what we’re doing usually with magnetism is we’re taking electricity, we’re turning it to kinetic energy, we’re turning it into something that moves something while using magnetism, or we’re turning it into light, which is really heat, honesty. I mean, they’re directly related to each other, which is, generally speaking, a resistive flow. We’re just running electricity through, which is creating heat, creating light byproduct.

But I think you should know, electricity seeks equilibrium normalcy by using the available paths is a useful way to think about how it looks. So, just like what I was saying about water, as pipes are to water, think of wires to electricity. So, when you’re thinking about a pipe, you’re not going to say, “Well, okay, I opened up the pipe, and the water didn’t flow.” Well, what’s the pipe hooked to? Why wouldn’t the water flow? These are kind of questions you would ask. And you opened up a faucet, no water comes out, you say, “What happened to the pump?” It’s the same with electricity. There are electrons all around us, and they’re not flowing in a very radical way, meaning that I can touch this desk. I’m full of electrons, the desk is full of electrons, and there is no transfer because we’re at equilibrium with each other.  Now, if I create a differential by dancing around on this rug in my socks and up and then I touch it, then maybe I’ll get shocked, or if I touch that chair. Anytime that you see something that’s occurring, especially if you’re technical or you want to know more about it, any time that you see something that’s occurring, just look up how that works, and you’ll find out that it always comes back, generally speaking, to the idea that a lot of magnetism and a lot of resistive flows are causing heat and light.

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Transcript

All right, so today we’re going to do Kalos 101. We’re going to be talking about the founding of Kalos, some of the areas of growth or vision that we’ve seen as we’ve gone on, and then our vision moving forward.

I thought it would be an interesting thing because a lot of times, as you go grow the business, obviously, you think that everyone knows everything about who you are and how you got to where you are, but a lot of times, as you go grow and as you hire employees and get more customers and expand your scope a little bit, sometimes, some of your founding principles can get lost, and sometimes people don’t know the whole story.

Let’s start by talking about where we came from and how we got started. In 2005, I was still working with the largest residential HVAC contractor in the Southeast, and my job at that business was to hire and train employees for the service department. I hired experienced technicians, but primarily, what I did was I hired and trained people who had never done air conditioning before to do air conditioning and to apprentice their way up through. We had run a fairly successful program there, but the reason why I really wanted to start my own business was that I had a real desire to build a business from the bottom up—the way that I thought we had been successful in building the department that I was a part of, which was to really hire people for who they were from a character standpoint, what they really believe, and then training them to skills. Most of the industry does it kind of the opposite. You hire people for their skills, and then you hope that they’re who you need them to be from a character-integrity standpoint. So, to me, that was kind of my vision all along when I started Kalos.

Now, from a logistic standpoint, I could have never started Kalos by myself. My father, Robert, had been in the industry—well, not in the HVAC industry, but in the construction industry—for, I don’t know, as long as I can remember. So, I guess probably prior to that, maybe 30 years or 25 years, and so he actually has taken a little bit of a hiatus from construction. He was doing private independent home inspections and also commercial properties as well, and he thought about getting back into the business because he had his contracting license as well as his electrical license, as well as my uncle, Keith Huntington, who’s probably one of the best tradesmen I’ve ever meet from a hands-on standpoint. He had a lot of experience in commercial, electrical, and construction, and he actually had been in the home inspection business for a while as well.

So, it’s a pretty broad range of skills that we had, and in our initial couple of meetings that we had, we were talking a lot about serving the real estate market, especially local realtors because my dad had a lot of connections with local realtors, and he thought, “Well, you know, there seems to be a real lack of service providers that tailor themselves to the local real estate market.” So, that was the original vision. We’re gonna start this, we’re gonna work for local realtor connections that we already have and just kind of go from there. So, I went and got my state contractor license and obviously spoke to my previous employer, and there was a good relationship. I left with their blessing and started Kalos.

Now, the original iteration of what Kalos was, was me, Keith, and my dad doing whatever it was that someone wanted us to do. So, if a realtor had a garage they wanted to be painted, then we would go paint a garage. That was one of the first jobs that I did as a Kalos employee—painting a garage—and I’m not a professional painter by any stretch of the imagination, but I just made do, and we made it happen. So then, we got into summer. We actually started the business, I believe, in September of 2005, if I’m not mistaken, and so it kind of started in the bad season, and so I didn’t really have very much A/C work, but I started getting to the summer and started doing small service realtors, just me and my work pen, and we started getting a few change-outs, which is sort of problematic because I didn’t really have anyone to help me do them and I was, at that time, probably about 30 pounds lighter than I even am now. So, you know, doing anything that required a lot of lifting and things of that nature by myself wasn’t really easy, but I just sort of brought Keith in or sometimes my brother-in-law, Jesse, who would help me do some things if he could. So, it was very limited, obviously, to what my abilities were. But we got more and more into commercial. We actually were able to break in and do some work for someone at Dixie and do some decent-size projects that I could do, and it actually led to some further success where we were able to actually make a profit, which is a difficult thing for a small business to do. We did a lot of residential remodels and renovations for people who were close connections of ours within Clermont, and so that led to us actually being able to grow a little bit.

The next step that we had was to hire someone else full-time in service, and so the first person who I thought of was my brother, Nathan, who was also working at the company that I left. So, after a lot of talking into, I got him to come and work for me and work with us, and we actually had a few guys who we used part-time. My other brother-in-law, Tim, worked with us a little bit, and he was formerly working with my dad in his home inspection business. So, I made do with what I could in order to get labor and in order to get the jobs done that I was able to get.

At that point, I did essentially no advertising. In the beginning, we really did zero advertising. After 2005, especially as we got into 2006-2007, which is kind of where we already are here, the housing market started to crash. And when the housing market crashed, the regular realtor-type customers weren’t moving houses like they were before, and there certainly wasn’t money in it anymore, so we really found ourselves in a position where that market wasn’t gonna work for us. Commercial construction was starting to pick up. We’re just trying to get some more work for customers, but our regular mainstay, what we decided to try to found the business on, that customer was sort of starting to dry up. But in the process, we made a couple of connections with some decent-sized customers and in the short-term vacation rental market, one of them being Liberty Vacations Homes, which is still one of our best customers, one of our largest customers down in that market. And we started Kalos off by actually doing electrical. We started off by doing emergency lighting for them. So, we would go in and install emergency lights because that’s required in short-term vacation rental homes in most counties because it’s sort of pseudo-commercial occupancy.

So, we were going to do that, and then we kept marketing ourselves. You know, we do air conditioning, and we will do pool heating. Well, I have done pool heating before. I mean, I have repaired pool heaters, but not to any great extent. So okay, we will give you one. Do you do gas pool heaters? Oh, I can. You know, so I’ll look at it and I actually started to become self-trained when it came to pool heating, which is experiencing it and working with it. The first time someone asked me to work on a pool control system, I was really in over my head. It’s the pool/spa actuators. You turn the dial, and the water all goes to the spa and it makes the bubbles and all this. I’m not a marketing guy, so when someone asks me to do something I’ve never done before, I’m not this super confident guy that says, “Oh yeah, no problem, sure, sure.” That isn’t my personality at all. My personality is to just tell them the blatant truth, which is, “Nope. I haven’t work on it before, but if you like me to look at it, I can try.” I can figure out most things, so I just started working on them and kind of just sorting my way through them, finding literature and reading up, and come to find out they’re really not that difficult. You know, you just have to understand what they’re about. So, we started getting into a little bit of pool automation, just simple pool heating automation for the short-term vacation rental industry.

So, what we found pretty quickly was that we had a pretty significant edge in that market. So, we hit that stride where we realized that this was a really good market for us, so I actually started reaching out to that industry. I joined their association and started meeting people. What’s interesting about it is that because I’m not a marketing guy, I’m not the guy who goes to meetings and says, “Hi, I’m Bryan. This is what I do.” That isn’t me. I just stand there and talk to people who come near me and get to know people. But what’s interesting is that the last time I went to one of those association meetings, I realized that I knew probably 80% of the people there, and a good portion of them are my customers now, and it didn’t happen through marketing. It didn’t happen through me pushing Kalos on them. It happened because we found a niche market, and we found a way to serve it to the best of our ability.

So, that forwarded to where we’re going today. We’re finding more and more niche markets. We’re finding ways to serve your regular residential homeowner better and better as we go trying to find ways to make our services more clear so that there is less confusion, better communication, quicker turnaround time, and better after-hour service. Those are all the things that your average homeowners are looking for, and we’re trying to find ways to serve them better as we go forward.

Okay, so I want to rewind back to that kitchen table conversation where my dad and I sat down and decided that we’re going to start a business. And even the search for the name of the business was an interesting endeavor because, let’s face it, our last name, Orr, is kind of a boring name. I mean, you could make a pun out of it, “Up A Creek without an Orr,” you could do something silly like that, but it’s cheesy. And then we thought, well there’s always the obvious thing. You know you could do comfort air, comfort services, or whatever, but the issue is that from the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to be a multifaceted business. We didn’t really want to limit ourselves. We didn’t want to be XYZ air conditioning, XYZ air, or XYZ construction because none of that really represented who we were and we were relying on the fact that we were really joining forces in order to make this happen. It wasn’t something that either of us was going to either have the willpower or the financial stability to do without each other.

I sort of provided the youthful interest in growing the business, and my dad definitely provided the experience, the wisdom, and the financial side in order to actually start a business, so we really kind of needed each other. But we wanted to start Kalos off all together, so what’s the name of the business like that? Well, you could call it South Lake Services. Well, that’s too geographic. You’re limiting yourself. So, what we decided was that we literally just opened up a Greek Dictionary, and we just started flipping through it, and we thought, okay, why Greek? I mean, I guess that’s the first question, why Greek? No, we’re not Greek. I’m mostly Polish. My dad is mostly Scottish. There is a little bit of American Indian there. You know, there’s no nationality that would equate to a Greek certainly, as you can tell by my “olive” complexion. So, the reason why it was a Greek Dictionary was that we recognized that there is a sort of richness to the ancient languages, especially the languages that the scriptures are written in. So, it’s because for us, really, the principle of doing all things heartily as unto the Lord is what we’ve always said. When going through a Greek Dictionary, we wanted to pick a word that had a little bit more fullness to it. That was not just to say “integrity services,” which we could have said that, and that would have been fine. But sometimes, you say words that we’re all familiar with, and they almost become trite and lose their value. So, we were picking something that people wouldn’t necessarily even know. That’s what we were trying to do; to us, it just seemed interesting. So, whether it was right or wrong, that’s what we decided to do.

So, we just went through and fell on the word Kalos. KAY-los is how we pronounce it, but really it’s more like KAA-lows. I think that’s the correct pronunciation; we don’t really care. We thought, “We’re ‘Muricans.” So, we fell on Kalos because the idea of Kalos is about completeness, wholeness, integrity. If you ask someone who speaks Modern Greek, they’ll say that it’s really just kind of good, you know, just good or some will even say beautiful or handsome. But really, what we’re looking for is the idea of integrity or fullness, completeness, and what I really struck on was the word integrity. You know, integrity is something that is basically to say that there’s an understanding of a higher purpose there. There’s an understanding of something that’s beyond yourself because you can’t really have integrity to yourself because what does that mean? You know everyone has their own thing, and to me, integrity means that there’s something that is of much greater importance than just the thing that I do. There’s something that is full and whole that dictates the decisions that we make and the things that we do. So for me, of course, that’s God. That’s doing things to honor God, doing things that please him, and making decisions in that direction.

So, for me, Kalos represented that idea the best of any of the words that I saw. Our job isn’t like evangelism. It’s not like we’re going out to every person and sharing the gospel. But it represents a fullness of our lives that if every other word coming out of our mouth isn’t scripture, the idea is that we’re bringing in the fullness of who God is through the way that we even interact with people and the business decisions that we make and the ways that we decide to do things. So, for both of us, that was really an attractive concept.

Now, our initial tagline was “Providing professional service, one customer at a time,” but we’ve simplified it to “Simply great service,” and the idea with providing professional service one customer at a time or simply great service is to say that it’s not about us. That’s the idea.  It’s that simply great service or providing professional service one customer at a time isn’t about us being of the highest quality. You could say that we’re, you know, the best quality service. Well, the problem with that is that it really is subjective, but really serving people because the idea of service is serving, providing great service, is all about focusing on that person, and so when my dad came up with the idea of providing professional service one customer at a time, the idea of one customer at a time is not focusing on what it is that you’re going to get out of this but really focusing on the object of your service and really providing them with what it is that they need. And it is a fine line. We just talked a lot about ideas when we were starting the business, and one of the ideas that I’ve always rejected is the idea that the customer is always right. There’s that saying within service where we say, “The customer is always right.” You know, that really is just a cop-out because if you say that the customer is always right, then you can just repeat that, and then that kind of recluses you from really making good decisions. You said, well, the customer is always right. Well, no, the customer isn’t always right, but that doesn’t mean that the customer isn’t always important. The customer is always valuable, and so I think it’s important to realize that when you’re looking at these things.

So, providing professional service one customer at a time isn’t doing whatever anyone asks me to do every single time. You see, that’s very different because doing what anyone asks you to do at any single time is may be really bad for them and really bad for your business, bad for your employees. So, that isn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to look at the business and say, “What is the wise choice?” (The wise choice meaning the choice that is really what’s best overall; there’s a lot of decisions you can make in a business that may be what the customer thinks is best for right now.) We have a lot of cases where customers will ask us to do things to their air conditioner because they want the very cheapest option or whatever that we are just not willing to do because it isn’t effective, safe, or wise. So you could say, well the customer is always right. Well, that would dictate to you that you do what it is that they ask you to do, but sometimes, what’s wise and what’s best isn’t what you’re asked to do. And so, for me, trying to kind of figure that out even in this tagline that we use and in the way that we named the business was a really important thing.

So, going through and understanding what is really important to us, what are we going to build the business on, and then it’s coming to the growth side of things or how we are actually going to make this happen. And like I said, initially, where we thought things are going to be, were not what they ended up being in the long run: thinking that serving the real estate market directly, that was gonna be sort of our niche and we were gonna stick with that. It didn’t really pan out, but being able to pivot based on the principles was really important for us—being able to say, “Okay, can we serve this customer?” because that’s a really valid question, and this is something that I think is really important when it comes to the idea of Kalos.

The idea of Kalos also means that I don’t tell people that I can do things that I really can’t do. You know, for example, if there were something that I really wasn’t able to provide a good competitive service on, I just couldn’t for whatever reason. Then, if it’s in the customer’s best interest, I tell them that, and we do that all the time. There are lots of things that come up that really we’re not the best option, but we get called because someone sees an ad or here’s a friend, our friends tell them about us or whatever, and they’ll call us and say with the air conditioning, you do this and that. And really, just so we know that it’s not the most effective option for them, and so part Kalos is being able to say, “Okay, well, maybe we can move and start to do that in the future or grow.” But a lot of times, the best thing to do is just say, “No. Here’s someone who we would refer for this.” So, that’s all part of what Kalos is.

But when it comes to this next step, I’m gonna get right into the vision of what Kalos is and how I think we can really make something that’s exceptional and grow something that’s exceptional. It goes back to the initial reason why I wanted to start my own business in the first place, and I think it’s easy to lose sight of that because what happens in any type of business is you get so caught up in doing business, fixing air conditioners, doing construction jobs, cleaning your van, talking to customers, collecting payment, ordering parts, doing warranty claims, and all those things that we do that you lose sight of what it is that really differentiates us and what it is that’s really going to make all the difference moving forward. And really, it’s people. That’s a simple way of putting it, but it’s people, and it’s having the right people.

One of the things that I think about most often in business is that I read a book called Good to Great, and in Good to Great, it talks about that the most important job that you can do when you’re running a business is, first of all, get the wrong people off of the bus. Second of all, get the right people on the bus before you decide where the bus is going to go, and there’s a lot of truth to that because you’re not going to go where you want to go with the wrong people. You’re not going to go where you want to go until you have the right people, and you shouldn’t even decide where you want to go until you do. And the reason for that is obvious, but that isn’t how business is played out day in and day out.

Day in and day out, what happens throughout corporate America is that decision-makers make decisions about what it is that they’re going to do. Is it going to make money or help the shareholders or serve their customers better? They make a decision, and then they send down the edict, and the edict says, “This is what we’re going to do, and there really is no concern for whether or not they have the right people to even do that.” It’s sort of like we’re going to make ourselves do this particular thing, and I think that’s the wrong way because you can do a lot of things with process. You can do a lot of things with administration, but the thing that you can’t do with either of those is actually make people good at their jobs. You can’t. You can keep them from making huge mistakes. Now, that’s what McDonald’s does when they sit a high schooler in front of a keypad that has pictures of the food, and they hit the picture of the food and then they have these timers for everything that says how long to cook everything. Really, what they’re doing is they’re not building a system to make a tremendous product, although some may argue that McDonald’s fries are a tremendous product. But they’re not building a system to really excel where their employees can actually be more than what the system is. They’re just trying to control it so that errors aren’t made–someone’s knocked dead scalding coffee again. That’s really what they’re trying to do, honestly, and it’s not that it’s wrong. It isn’t wrong. It just is what it is. It isn’t who we are.

Who we are is a business that wants to develop people to be bigger than the process, to be able to make Kalos more than a system, more than just a set of words in a book or a class that I can give. You want to be in a position where any single employee is better at doing their job than I could be if I did their job. That’s a really good place to be because what that means is that every person can excel and grow where they can grow—where their skills and inclination take them.

Here is the challenge:

The challenge is that everyone gets tied down to doing their job day in and day out. I do. I mean, I get totally overwhelmed at times just doing the daily tasks that I have to do. You come into the office, and you do this work you do. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s good. It’s good to have work to do, and I’m really very thankful and blessed to have work, to have jobs that feed our families. But growth, vision, and purpose are all about continuing to progress. The Japanese have a concept called Kaizen. I’m probably botching that pronunciation, but the idea is continuous improvement. The idea is that there is nothing that you should do that you just say, “Now it’s done.” There really isn’t anything in life that is that way. I mean, you look at raising children and relationships and sports. Anything that you do while you’re in your car, your car stereo, you know, whatever it is, there is always something you can improve. There is always some way to grow, and if you just try to get to a place from a professional standpoint where you say, “Oh yeah. I’ve reached this place that I always wanted to be, and now that’s fine.” It may be fine. So, you may say maybe this is the position I should be in. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. You may say, “This is all the money I need to make anymore.” That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. You may say this is the only other company I want to work for. I don’t want to work for another company. I’ll say that’s fine.

But to say, “I don’t want to improve anymore,” that’s very dangerous. To say, “I’m where I want to be, that’s dangerous because that isn’t a mindset of continuous improvement. Just in the same way that if we don’t work out our muscles, our muscles start to atrophy and deteriorate. Our minds and our personal progressions start to deteriorate and atrophy. So, there’s nothing that makes me more concerned about someone than when I hear them talk about something that they’ve just given up on—a part of who they are, they’ve just given up on, and I do it too. I may say something like, “Oh man, I am just not an installer. You know, I try to make something level with this. This is the case. I’m a service guy. I like to fix broken things, but when it comes to making something look level with an eyeball, my eyes just betray me.” And I could just say, “Well, you know what, forget that.” No, the answer isn’t, “Forget that.” The answer may be, “Yeah, I’m never going to be good at seeing things level naturally, but they make a tool for that. It’s called a level. So, I don’t need to give up on being good at something.” I should just say, “All right, I need to adjust, and I need to grow, and I need to learn how to use the tools that I’m given better.”

When I hear someone say, “Technology just isn’t for me.” Well, I hate to break it to you, but it kind of is because if you lived in a horse and buggy days and you said, “Technology is just not for me,” that means you wouldn’t have been driving a Model T, and you would have been left behind by industry. That’s just the reality. So, to say, “I struggle with technology,” well, that’s honest. You know, a lot of us do, [struggle with] different aspects of technology, but to say that it’s not for me, you’re putting a damper on yourself. You’re putting a cap on yourself that’s artificial, and when it comes to personal development, that’s one of the mindsets that you can’t really train. You can encourage it, and you can hire for it, but you can’t really train it because so much of it has to do with who you surround yourself with, even outside the work.

If you’re hanging out with negative people who say things like, for example, “Well, it is what it is.” You hear that all the time. Yeah, that’s the solution. I mean, well, it is what it is, and I say it too, but if that is the tone of a person’s life who you spend time with all the time, that’s not a Kaizen tone. That’s very, “Nothing you can do about it; the world happens to me, I don’t happen to it; it just is what it is, right?” Well, that’s not true. It isn’t true at all. The only real person who can directly affect who you are day in and day out is yourself, and who you are will dictate the opportunities that come your way, and whether or not you continue to grow or not. And for me, continuing to grow is honestly enough. It really is, even for Kalos. To me, things can happen. You know, the economy can turn down. You know, you can have people who you hire who didn’t turn out to be who they thought they were. Well, those types of things happen. You can get sick. I could break a leg tomorrow. Those things happen. You can’t do anything about it. But to me, for myself and for Kalos, I want to see people who are interested and continuing to grow and improve their lives.

I almost said to you that life gets better, but I want to be careful because even that, that doesn’t mean easy. Things happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t mean easy. It means that you know that you are where you’re supposed to be, that you know that you’re in the center of God’s will. It’s the way that I would put it; you’re growing towards who it is that you were made to be and what your purpose is and that you’re continuing to improve in those ways.

For us as a business, that looks like recognizing opportunities and then hiring and developing people who have the proper character to meet those opportunities, to meet those things that I see out there, and it’s difficult always for me because my nature is very—I don’t want to say “visionary” because that sounds like I’m saying that I’m a visionary—but my nature is to look in the future. For me, I’m not nearly as concerned about what happens a month from now or how many checks we gather in as I am about what Kalos will look like 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now when some of my children are maybe working here. That, to me is what’s very interesting, and don’t ask me why.  It’s just the way I’m wired, but for me, I want to develop people now who can be the divisional leaders 5 years from now, 10 years from now, and it isn’t because I want to be really rich or I want to have Kalos be in a big building. I couldn’t care less. It really doesn’t matter to me, all those types of things. What matters to me is the idea of seeing development in others. It’s what I love about my job more than anything else, what I loved about the past job that I had more than anything else is seeing people grow, seeing people grow in wisdom, making better decisions, and perspective. There’s nothing better than talking to someone about a technical idea or really any kind of idea and seeing the light go off in their head where it’s like, “Okay, I understand that.” That is very rewarding for me. So, hiring people who have those abilities and seeing them develop is really important.

I want Kalos to be a place that provides you with the opportunity to make it what you want it to be, and I’m going to start to hire people who want it to be something that’s really great for our customers. It isn’t getting that next big contract that’s going to make Kalos something special. It’s having people and growing people who see it as something that they can use as a theater that they can grow in and that they can help others grow. The minute that I see a technician who doesn’t want to help a new guy learn, I’m really looking carefully at that guy because, to me, that indicates a real sickness, and it’s a sickness that we see within our industry.

The whole idea of protectionism in the industry is something that I just reject completely—the idea that we have some secret knowledge that we have to prevent people from understanding. I want everyone to understand this business. Now, there are some concepts and some things within the industry that are very hard for people to understand because you have to have the experience to understand it, so I’m not going to go to a customer and start talking advanced psychrometrics. That probably isn’t the best use of my time, but what is a good use of my time is for me to start to educate people, be willing to educate people, to have the heart of a teacher. That’s a really important part of what we do: a heart of a teacher with customers, a heart of a teacher with other employees, and if our vulnerability is kind of revealing who we are and what it is that we think leads to somewhat correcting us, well great. That’s great. If someone can help me by telling me something that I’m doing wrong or something that I could improve, that’s excellent. But if someone just wants to beat another person up because they’re not perfect, well that’s a human condition.

You know, we’re all imperfect, and we have to be willing to learn from our mistakes, even when it comes to things that I know a lot of people will say. Even my wife says it to me sometimes, “Are you sure that you know exactly what you’re doing there?”

The answer is, “No, I’m sure that I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.” The more that I do, the more I realize that there’s so much that I still need to learn, and really, I can’t wake up the next morning getting upset about all the stuff I don’t know. What I have to do every morning when I wake up is be excited about the things that I can learn and the things that I can grow.

So, that’s it for Kalos 101. I hope you guys have enjoyed it.

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Links and Items Mentioned In This Video

• Voltage
• Amperage
• Wattage

Transcript

I want to try to define some electrical terms you hear a lot in a very simplistic way.

You’ll hear the terms amp, volt, ohm, and watt. It’s important to understand the difference between the four of them. If you’re not going to understand anything else, it’s important to recognize that in most cases, when people are talking about electricity, they almost always use the terms amp, volt, and watt interchangeably. They’re just saying, “It’s electricity.” But really, these electrical terms represent completely different concepts–completely different explanations of what’s happening with electricity or electron flow.

Okay, so first, I like to talk about these terms using an analogy of a highway. Think of a wire or a conductor like a highway. If I were to stand on the side of a highway that’s in rush hour traffic and I were to take a picture, it would just be a still shot. I’d look at it and see all of these cars lined up, and I say to someone, “Look at that. That’s a busy road. There are a lot of cars on that road.”

They’ll say, “Wow. There are a lot of cars on that road.” But all that I’m doing is showing a still photo; those cars may not be moving at all, maybe just been sitting there. They may sit there for hours. Think of the cars on the road like amperage. We’re saying that this is how many cars there are at this moment, a snapshot. It has nothing to do with how fast there are moving.

In the same way, I could talk about voltage, and I could go there at 2 am and see a guy on a Kawasaki Ninja going really fast. I could say, “Wow! This road is busy because there’s a really fast guy on this road.” But that might not be accurate either. It may just not be busy. It’s just maybe little one guy in this Kawasaki Ninja going awesomely fast.

So, neither really gives you the whole picture. One is telling us how fast the car is going. The other is asking how many cars are there at a given moment on the road. So, how many cars are there and how fast are they going? It’s a really unscientific explanation, but it works as a way to kind of help us think about what we’re talking about.

So, when we say voltage and amperage, what we’re really saying is that velocity and force are voltage. Quantity of electrons, that’s amperage. Wattage is a measure combining the two. How many cars AND how fast are they going? So, you could say something like, “Wattage should measure the number of cars that are passing this point per minute.” That would be a way of explaining what wattage is. It’s an overall picture of how many electrons are being moved over a period of time.

Thanks for watching!

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5 Electric Safety Tips for Avoiding Lightning in Central Florida

1. Know That Lightning CAN Enter Your Home
   

   Has mom taught you to get off the phone during lightning? Do you remember the newscaster who urged you to unplug your computer? Well, they were both correct. Lightning can access your home via either a direct strike or through wires that go to the home’s exterior. When lightning strikes the latter, the electricity of the lightning travels through the plumbing, phone, and electrical lines. Since you have metal mesh in your concrete floors, it travels through those as well.

2. Stay Off the Corded Phone
   

   Who would’ve guessed that Mom was an electrician? One of the oldest lightning safety tips is still to hang up the corded phone (for those who still have those!). No conversation is so important that it supersedes your personal well-being.

3. Avoid Concrete Floors and Walls
   

   Many concrete floors contain wire mesh. We also use wire mesh in slabs used in garages around Central Florida. Stay off this surface during storms. Surround yourself with materials that don’t conduct electricity. In other words, don’t fly any kites.

4. Steer Clear of the Plumbing
   

   Remember: plumbing pipes are major conductors of electricity because of the water they transport. Staying safe during a particularly severe storm calls for limited contact with these pipes. That means no washing dishes, no hand washing, no laundry, and even no showering (kids worldwide can celebrate that last one).

5. Install Electric Surge Protection
   

   Unplugging the refrigerator is not feasible. After all, replacing all the spoiled food is going to be a huge hit to the pocketbook. Unplugging your computer every time it thunders in Clermont is unrealistic as well. Make sure your electricians have installed your home with the surge protection it needs. So many options are available, from specific Air Conditioning protection to whole-home solutions. Make sure to check with your electrical contractor to see if whole-home surge protection is right for your home or business.

Electric Safety Starts with Knowledge

If your home does get hit by lightning, or you think that you may have been the recipient of a residual electricity charge stemming from a nearby lightning strike, give us a call today. We will gladly come out to check your electrical system and let you know if we detect any melted wires or damage to your panel. It is always better to be safe than sorry.

You may also fill out the form below and we will contact you soon:

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As your local Clermont electrical contractor, we are proud of the A+ rating our amazing customers have awarded us! We truly love being your go-to electrician!

But don’t just take our word for it; take five minutes today to ensure you’re using quality Clermont electrical contractors who won’t disappoint you!

Here’s an explanation of the BBB grades Clermont electrical contractors:

• Letter grades represent the BBB’s opinion of the electrical company.
• The grade is based on customer feedback and how much information exists about the business (e.g., is the business’s address accurate?)
• BBB assigns letter grades from A+ (highest) to F (lowest). In some cases, BBB will not grade the business (indicated by an NR or “No Rating”) for insufficient information about a business.

BBB Business Reviews generally explain the most significant factors that raised or lowered a business’ grade. Here’s an example of Clermont’s electrical contractors found on the site:

For further information on how to hire a quality electrician, watch the short video below!

We hope this article has been helpful. Simply Great Service is more than just words for our company; it’s how we live our lives and treat our customers every day!

Do you have questions? We can help! Fill out the form below:

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