Written by: Philip Jones

Natural disasters are an unfortunate part of life and business. Lighting storms, icy road conditions, rock slides, floods, and more can all present a costly and dangerous element to your business when they result in a commercial power failure. Even something as simple as rain blowing a local transistor, birds or squirrels on power lines, or a fallen tree, can send your business headlong into hours or days without electronic power. How well would your business operate without the use of a/c, heating, refrigeration, and commercial electronic equipment? Fortunately, there are a handful of precautions you can take to mitigate the potential damage done to your business when a commercial power outage occurs. These tips will ensure that your electrical repair Houston services are not too taxing on your business’s overall health during a disaster.

Surge Protection

When power is finally restored, electrical surges can spike the voltage of any devices that are plugged in, damaging or destroying them in seconds. Consequently, surge protectors can be a crucial line of defense between your business and red ink. Expensive electronics are especially vulnerable to electric surges including microwaves, televisions, personal computers, cellphones, and the like. Even if your power is lost for only a moment, you may end up incurring hundreds of dollars in damaged electronics without proper surge protection. While electrical repair Houston can help solve your office’s physical scars, it’s important to maintain the various devices lodged within your place of business.

While surge protectors are designed with certain minimum specifications in mind to help guarantee their protection, there are still ways to distinguish great surge protectors from tolerable ones. According to Portland General Electric you should choose a surge protector which offers protection for at least 54,000 amperes, 330 volts, and 700 joules.

To maximize your protection, you can also get a meter-mounted surge protector installed on the electrical line just before your meter. This procedure is carried out by an electrician following the guidelines of your local power company, and can often protect your business from surges before they even enter your building. Finally, GFCI outlets (or ground fault circuit interrupter) are outlets that include red and black test and reset buttons. Outlets of this kind shut off electronic flow should the current become dangerous to either your possessions or your personnel.

Consider Liability Insurance

Liability insurance can cover many different types of property damages. If commercial power outage causes the destruction of perishable goods, some types of insurance may be able to help recover your losses. While this option is more viable for businesses that can expect almost routine power loss, it can also offer a relatively inexpensive alternative to anyone who stands to suffer greatly from the loss of electric power.

Generators

How does keeping your business open and efficient while your local competition has to shut their doors sound? Backup power generators are a relatively inexpensive alternative to enduring short term power loss of any kind. Any organization that operates numerous computers, especially in the web hosting industry, maintains a fleet of backup power generators to help ensure that their computer hardware isn’t damaged from sudden and unexpected shutdown and that their business is not interrupted by local commercial power failure of any duration.

Have a plan

Don’t waste resources by having staff on hand that aren’t able to work during a power failure. If you have employees which can only work when there’s power available, make sure there is a formal plan in place to direct them once you’ve determined the expected duration of the failure. Without a plan in place, and with the lines of communication potentially broken by the outage, your software engineers may show up at work the next day, waiting by their powerless computers.

Written by: Philip Jones

As a business owner, you may find that you are in need of electrical services for your office or other establishment. Obviously, unless you’re a skilled electrician yourself, which is unlikely, you’re going to need to hire a professional to do the job for you. Knowing who to hire, however, can prove to be a real challenge, especially since most cities have many different electrician companies in addition to private contractors who offer their work on an as-needed, individual basis. Fortunately, there are some handy tips for choosing the right commercial electrician in Houston.

Keep the “Commercial” in Commercial Electrician

Most of the electrician services that you’ll come across will be specifically geared toward the homeowner. While you might think that these electricians are the same as those who work on commercial properties, this is actually not the case. Most commercial buildings are larger than standard homes and may even be wired differently to accommodate for their unique needs. As such, if you hire a home-only electrician, you could end up with someone who doesn’t know how to do your commercial job properly. Look for a strictly commercial service or professional or a service or professional that is skilled and experienced with both commercial and personal properties. Access Electric is a premier commercial electrician Houston firm that any business owner will feel confident enlisting for even the most challenging electrical project.

Turn to the Internet

You can tell a lot about an electrician or an electrical company by checking out its website. Look for a website that is professional, that provides clear contact information, and that is upfront about services provided and costs involved. If a company or individual’s website is honest and clear, chances are they will be as well!

Request an Estimate

An electrician should never come out, do the job, and then just expect you to pay up on the spot. Any electrician who works this way is not operating professionally or in a way that is beneficial to you. Instead, you want to choose an electrician who comes to your place of business, at your convenience, and who provides a free estimate. You can then agree or disagree with this estimate, which you should be free to do without any sales pressure. This also gives you a chance to shop around and compare pricing for the best deal. Once the job is done to your satisfaction, only then should you pay, and the price that you pay should be very close to the estimate you were quoted.

Written by: Philip Jones

If you need to rewire your office, you might be concerned that it will be a very long and expensive ordeal. Fortunately, this does not need to be the case. The most important thing that you can do is hire an electrical services Houston contractor who is licensed to do the electrical work. Even if someone on your staff has experience with rewiring an office, it is important to only utilize the services of someone who is licensed so that you will be protected if anything goes wrong.

Why Should I get My Office Rewired?

Some people think that it makes more sense to avoid getting their office rewired, but this can actually cause your productivity to go way down, especially if you are in an older building. For example, any office building that was wired before computers became a necessity probably does not have a stable enough main panel. Getting this panel upgraded as part of the electrical rewiring process will enable your entire system to deal with the power requirements of a lot of electronics. Access Electric offers a wide range of electrical services Houston, to deal with the various intricacies that any office wiring project entails.

Preparing for the Work Site

Most managers and employees feel stressed out about the idea of turning their work space into a construction work site, but an electrical rewiring project will not typically cause you the type of issues that other construction related work will. Unless you decide to rewire your office one room at a time, you are most likely going to need to schedule the work during a time period when your employees will not need to be in the office. After all, electricity is essential for doing any office work, and various things will be disconnected at different times as the electrician works their way through the rewiring process. The good news, however, is that most rewiring jobs can be done in a short period, and a lot of contractors work on the weekends. In other words, it is possible that the entire job could be taken care of during the time frame when your office is closed. If this is not possible, however, you should consider having at least part of your staff either work from home or from a selected remote location so that your workflow is not interrupted.

The Clean Up Process

Rewiring an office does cause some debris, but most contractors will clean up the mess that they have made. To make the process go more smoothly, you should consider having drop cloths in place over the top of desks and computer equipment. This will enable either the contractor or your staff to simply remove the drop cloths and most of the debris without making a mess or damaging equipment. Disposable plastic drop cloths are a great option if you do not normally have the need for reusable ones.

Resuming Normality

Because the rewiring process is relatively quick and easy, you can typically resume normal operations within a day or two. Your new wiring will make everything work more efficiently, and keep everyone working in an environment that meets code.