Understanding Your Home’s Electrical System with an Electric Company in Red Deer

Understanding Your Home’s Electrical System with an Electric Company in Red Deer

Hey everybody. Welcome to Lumentek Electrical Contracting, top electric company in Red Deer, Alberta, and we’re going to be talking to Ryan. Ryan is the seasoned owner of Lumentek Electrical with years of expertise in the electrical industry. Ryan is passionate about empowering homeowners with the knowledge that they need to understand and safely manage their homes’ electrical systems. Today he’s here to shed light on common electrical queries and share essential tips every homeowner should know.

All right, Ryan, here’s some of the questions that people may have about their electrical system that you can answer for us. First question is: Can you start by explaining what the main components of a typical home electrical system are and the role each plays in ensuring our homes are powered safely?

Of course. First of all, you have your meter, and the power either comes to the meter from the street above‑ground or overhead, just depending on where your house is. As the power passes through the meter, that’s where the utility company monitors how much power you use, and that will determine what your bill is at the end of the month. From the meter it goes to the panel, and that’s where it will go to individual circuits and run power to the rest of your home.

How To Tell You Have Electrical Problems In Your Home

So let’s go on to question number two: What are some of the common signs that may indicate an electrical problem in a home, and how should homeowners respond to this?

The most obvious one would probably be breakers tripping all the time. Breakers normally won’t trip unless there’s an issue. If a breaker trips once, that’s fine—that’s the purpose of them—but if it’s tripping constantly and you’re finding you’re going down to the panel on a regular basis to reset stuff, it’s probably time to get someone to look at your panel and see what’s going on. Another thing that could indicate an issue is when you have things turning on and off as they’re on, so if you have your lights on and they turn off and come on, or you hear any buzzing in the switches, there’s an indication that there’s something going on that shouldn’t be. Yeah, last, there’s also—so if you have appliances running or anything like that when, like, a dryer starts, for instance, it will dim your lights a little bit, but if you find lights are actually turning off or getting really dim, then that’s also an indicator that there’s something else going on that needs to get tracked.

Okay, good to know. Now, can you go into a little bit more detail about the electrical panel—often referred to as the breaker box—and what homeowners should know about its operation and maintenance?

Your Breaker Box Is Important to Your Home

If a panel’s installed correctly and everything’s sized correctly, you should almost never need to go there to do anything. But one thing that we see a lot is customers will have a lot of stuff stored in front of their panel, and that becomes an issue if you ever need to turn a breaker off in an emergency. If you have to move a bunch of stuff and it takes you fifteen minutes to get there, if you have a problem that could escalate the issue for sure. So keeping the panel accessible is a big thing.

Making sure the cover’s installed properly—we’ve seen lots of panels, particularly in older homes, where the cover’s been thrown away and no one knows where it is. That can create issues if something falls against the panel that’s metal, or just kids playing around it or just getting in there. The panel keeps it clean as well as keeps everyone safe around it.

Yeah, that’s the biggest thing. Now, what about operation—like, how do they properly reset a breaker, and is there any maintenance that needs to be done on a breaker box or electrical panel?

Can You Reset Your Breaker Panel?

Resetting a breaker is fairly straightforward. A lot of the time you just need to firmly push the breaker in the OFF position once it’s tripped, and then it will reset. If you try to just reset it from it being tripped, a lot of the time it won’t reset. As far as maintenance goes in the panel, in residential panels it’s really not necessary to do preventative maintenance. When we get into commercial sites and industrial sites, a lot of the time we’ll go in annually, pull the covers off, use infrared scanners on all the breakers, make sure there’s no heat issues, make sure there’s no dust buildup, anything like that. But in the majority of panels in normal conditions, there’s no need to do annual maintenance or anything like that on them.

All right, cool. Now, how would one determine if their home’s electrical system is up to current safety standards, and are there any specific regulations or codes that homeowners should be aware of?

The biggest indicator would be a sticker from the inspection authority, so that could be the City of Red Deer and Blackfalds would be I.G.D. and a few other companies, Superior Inspections—that will have a sticker on there saying the date it was inspected and installed. If your panel has no sticker on it anywhere, that could be an indication that there’s something that was done—or it was done without any kind of inspections or regard for code.

The other thing is the service coming in, the line from the meter, has to be protected, so it should be in an armored cable or in a conduit. That’s a pretty good indication too of whether it’s been done up to current code or not. The other thing is covers—if the cover is missing, that’s a pretty big red flag that there’s something going on. And exposed wire on the panel too—we’ve seen some where it’s just single conductors coming in, so the actual jacket from the cable’s missing; it’s just wires going into the panel, and that is a big no‑no.

Frequent Electrical Mistakes Homeowners Make

Let’s look at some mistakes. In your experience, what are some of the most frequent mistakes that homeowners make regarding their electrical systems, and how can this be avoided?

Three‑way switches are probably the most common. A lot of homeowners will try to change out three‑way switches and end up with weird issues with their lighting; also, a lot of electricians do them wrong. The biggest, easiest way to do them is: the two of the wires don’t matter where they go—they can be interchanged. It’s the one that’s on the black screw on the switch that needs to be on the black screw on the new switch, and that gets missed all the time. It’ll cause weird issues with switching.

Okay, good to know. Anything else?

Installing Light Fixtures Properly – Hire a Professional

A lot of the time we see light fixtures that are installed without the right screws, or people use wood screws or drywall screws to hold light fixtures up. Problem with that is the boxes are designed to take a certain size of screw, so the drywall screw or wood screw might hold, but you’re only getting one or two threads engaged, not the three or four that would normally be when it’s installed properly. And, yeah, you don’t want a light falling off your ceiling; doesn’t—no—makes for a bad day.

Yeah, all right, what else?

Installing plugs—we’ve seen a lot of strange things happen there. Biggest ones usually are people strip too much wire or not enough, so the wire can’t fully wrap around the screw, and that can cause the wire to pop off or touch the side of the box and short out, or just not contact well enough to create a circuit. Those are the most common issues we see.

All right, cool, thanks for sharing that. And also, like, when people use the quick connect in the back of receptacles and switches, that sometimes can be an issue. I know back in my day that was something we fixed often.

Yeah, there’s a lot of service calls for that.

Electrical Efficiency In Your Home

Next question would be: Can you explain the concept of an electrical circuit and why understanding this can help homeowners manage their power usage more effectively?

Yeah. So from the panel we run circuit to individual locations for different uses around the home, and we do that for a variety of reasons, mostly for safety. That way, if there’s an issue—most circuits in your house are fifteen amps—it’s a lot better to trip a fifteen‑amp breaker than the hundred‑amp breaker at the top of the panel. For maintenance as well it’s really helpful, because we can turn off one circuit without having to turn the whole house off. And for troubleshooting, obviously, as well, so we can—we know there’s a problem with a specific circuit; we can look there instead of having to search the whole house for what could be causing the issue.

Yeah, and then if you are planning on adding anything, it’s important to know what you’re going to add so we can size the circuit accordingly.

Electrical Safety Tips For Your Home

Okay, nice. Now, what are some safety tips you would recommend for homeowners who are handling minor electrical tasks themselves, such as replacing a light fixture or an outlet?

First of all, it’d be: Make sure the power’s off. It’s pretty easy to do if what you’re replacing is already working. So if you have a new fixture to replace an outdated fixture, that’s as simple as just turning the light switch off, making sure the light was on, turned off, and just make sure no one walks in and turns the light switch on while you’re working.

For plugs, what I like to do is plug something in that’s loud, like a vacuum—anything like that—and then you can go downstairs, and the panel should be labeled, but a lot of the time they’re not labeled very well, so it might take a couple breakers. But as soon as you hear the vacuum shut off, or whatever you’ve got plugged in, you’ll know you got the right circuit. And same thing—just make sure everyone in the house knows that you’re working on it, not to turn it back on until you’re done.

Yeah, and with lights make sure you use the right screws and that it’s properly secured to the ceiling; and with plugs, same thing: Make sure it’s in the box correctly, the right kind of screws, so it doesn’t pull out if someone pulls on a cord too hard, and yeah, all the connections are nice and tight.

Should You Do Your Own Electrical Work?

Nice. Okay, so that’s some good tips on how to stay safe when working with electrical, doing your own fixes. Now the next question is about advancements in home electrical technology, such as smart home systems. How can these things impact electrical requirements in modern homes?

The biggest thing with smart homes is that you can—or smart devices; there are a whole bunch out there—you can control things remotely and have everything scheduled. So that’s nice for, like, we’ve had—I’m trying to think of a specific example—we’ve installed hot tubs for people where they don’t have enough electrical capacity in their panel. But what we’ve done is interlocked it so the air conditioner can’t run the same time the hot tub’s running, so that way you can’t overload the service. And a lot of the time, if it’s that hot out you’re running your air conditioning, you probably don’t want to go in the hot tub anyway, right? But stuff like that to ensure that you’re not going to have an overload.

Most thermostats are set up that way too, so you can’t accidentally turn on the air conditioning and heat at the same time. Stuff like that lets you size the service to the home smaller, or not need to upgrade the service as early on as you would otherwise.

Okay, and some other things with the smart home—like you said, they can control it remotely, so they can make sure the lights are off if they’ve left the house, and these types of things are also available, and I think those are neat to have. Can you put those—can you put those on even older homes?

Retrofitting Older Homes is Possible

Yes. Yeah, everything pretty much can be retrofitted fairly easily now. A lot of it’s designed with that in mind, that you’re going to add it to an older home. Another nice feature too is you can put leak detectors in your mechanical room that will notify you on your phone if there’s water on the floor or anything like that. There’s smoke detectors—yeah, that’s good to know; you’re not going to go home to a swimming pool in the basement.

Yeah, exactly—you know ahead of time whether that’s good or bad; do you really want to know?

Exactly.

Okay, so what steps should homeowners take to prepare their electrical systems for major home renovations or additions?

One issue we run into a lot is panels are full before the renovation begins, so that can be an issue. Usually a lot of renovations require whatever is being changed or modified to be brought up to current code, and that will be an issue because a lot of older homes didn’t require dedicated circuits for many things. So, for instance, bathrooms used to be tied onto bedrooms all the time, and dishwashers and counter plugs and fridges and counter plugs used to be mixed; now they all have to be dedicated. So you’re going to need more space in your panel depending on what you’re renovating.

Professional Electricians Can Help You Finish Your Basement

Another big thing we see a lot is people will finish a basement, for instance, and not tell us that they plan on adding a hot tub down the road or adding a detached garage. When there’s no drywall in the basement, it’s really easy for us to run a cable and just leave it rolled up outside or capped off or whatever, and it saves a ton of mess down the road. When you’re in reno mode already, it’s nice to take care of all those things at once.

Yeah, agreed. And renovating—yeah, right, taking it apart after you just put it together, that’s never a good thing.

No, it’s not fun. Makes for a grumpy customer, but hey, they should have thought of it beforehand, right?

Yeah, we always try to ask, but there’s almost always someone at the end of the reno who goes, “Oh, how hard is it to add this now?”

Choose the Right Electrician in Red Deer

Perfect. Okay, last question: For those looking to hire a professional electrician, what advice would you give them on choosing the right person for their needs?

I would check Google reviews or Facebook reviews—anything like that. It’s so easy on the internet now; anyone can post anything, and it’s pretty easy to find stuff about different companies. Another thing I would do is make sure they actually have a Red Seal ticket or Master Electrician ticket. I’ve—in my two years with Lumentek—I’ve never once been asked for my Red Seal or a Master Electrician license, which I have both, but I thought more people would ask.

And another thing is: Make sure that whoever you’re hiring has liability insurance, because no matter how good you are, there’s always a chance something could go wrong or something could get damaged. It’s always nice to know that they have insurance—and Workers’ Safe too, for sure.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for answering those questions – if anyone needs a electric company in Red Deer, contact Ryan at LumenTek today!