Full Transcript
Hey Garage Door Fans. I’m Chris Wilke with C&W; Canada Garage Doors and I’m here today with Kevin Steigh, owner of Halo Power Solutions.How are you today Kevin? Excellent Chris, so happy to be here. Cool, so we are here to talk about upgrades today but before we get into all that Kevin why don’t you tell the people at home a little bit about your business. I would love to. Thanks for the opportunity. So Chris, Halo Power is in its fifth year in business and we specialize in residential renovations, service upgrades, lighting upgrades - that’s our real bread and butter. Also on the commercial side, we look for tenant improvements. If you’re doing a renovation in your office space, service upgrades, or any power upgrades to your commercial space and of course LED lighting upgrades are a big one as well. Thanks Kevin and I’m glad that I have you as a guest today. I know we both have a lot to say about home upgrades. We’re both in the businesses helping people renovate their homes and make them feel more modern. But the big question I have for you and the first question I have for you is what’s a simple upgrade that people can do with to their lighting or their electrical that make their home feel a little bit more modern or up-to-date? Absolutely. Great question. LED lighting, I mean the only new lighting so mainstream now and it’s tough to even buy a little incandescent bulb, but when you do a lighting upgrade to your home... first of all the biggest advantages is the the drop of your power consumption. You’re going to see your electricity going down from a longevity standpoint of the LED bulbs. You know, we’re getting 20 years out of these bulbs now, so there’s no more climbing up on the ladder to change the light bulb every six months. From your overall look and feel of your home. I mean, lighting is so important and if you’ve got a well lit home that’s comfortable and pleasing, that does a lot for your mood so coming home and turning on your nice fresh LED lights and just being able to relax does wonders for you. I think of all the upgrades we do, the LED lighting upgrades are the most satisfying because you can really see the before and after. People just, you know, the whole mood changes. They just love the improvement. Actually and speaking of satisfying I get the same sort of satisfaction out of replacing a loud garage door opener, as I like to call a neighbor waker. I love that. Yeah, when you hit the button and you could just hear it all the way in Australia - those are the ones I like to rip out and replace with a nice quiet DC motor. Some of them even come built in with LED lights, battery backup, super quiet and super nice - especially if you have a bedroom over the roof of your garage. It’s super essential to have at least a very quiet motor and it’s super easy upgrade and very inexpensive. Let’s see, so what kind of electrical upgrades are you seeing right now Kevin? Well a lot of people are staying in their homes and renovating, bringing them up to date. So the biggest upgrade that we’re seeing is in the homes that are, you know. say pre-1990. We’re doing upgrades of the electrical panel. In some cases we’ve got to do an upgrade to be the meter socket on the outside and with, you know, people wanting to put in hot tubs, air conditioning, electric car chargers, now we’re actually doing service upgrades to the home. Where a lot of homes have a hundred amp service, which is very typical, now we’re having to increase that to accommodate the the power consumption of the devices we’re bringing in the homes. So panel upgrades, service upgrades are a big one and of course lighting which I already talked about. Another great upgrade is updating the plugs and switches in your home. They wear out like anything else but I like doing those when we do the plug upgrades because now we always install the tamper-resistant kid-proof plugs. Great upgrade if you’ve got little kids in the home, if your a grandparent and you’ve got the little ones in the house, there’s no more of this picking up a paper clip and jamming it in to see what happens, right? Because they fit so well in those plugs! Our industries a very very similar. We are upgrading a lot of our openers into DC power openers which allows us to put battery backups, so no longer are you trapped in the garage when the power goes out. And also upgrading the face of your garage door is super huge, because again, in terms of your let’s say older house into a more modern, more sophisticated look and again, it’s one of the most inexpensive things you can do for your home is to install a brand-new garage door. So that’s what we’re looking at right now and that’s what seems to be trending, at least in my industry. Yeah, so I know updating electrical systems are a bit dangerous in some cases, like I’m afraid garage doors can also be very dangerous or garage door openers. What kind of problems are you seeing in the older homes. Well, you know, people are trying to save money and sometimes they’ll take on an electric projects themselves that they probably don’t have any business doing. I use the analogy of you know if you have a sore tooth or needed a root canal you’re probably not gonna watch a YouTube video and do it yourself in your basement or call your buddy over because he just recently had a root canal and he knows how to do it. Pretty common my industry too. I always tell people, well I wouldn’t operate on you. Wo a lot of the times well we’re running into situations where maybe somebody’s just moved into an older home and they don’t realize that there was a lot of work done previously by a handyman or a homeowner. Someone who’s not certified. Not certified and you know with our electrical trade, the electrical code is forever changing. There’s new regulations coming in place for how the electrical is installed, safety devices and if you’re not up on that and you start doing your own electrical work, you can run into problems because a lot of the work that we find is being done by homeowners, it hasn’t been done under electrical permit. It’s also a lot of rules and regulations that they may not be aware of in terms of a city and stuff like that. Absolutely, and where it’s really coming to light now is when people are selling their homes and a new potential buyers coming in interested in buying the home doing, their due diligence, and checking to see if there were permits pulled for that kitchen renovation or basement development. A few things that come up and what ends up happening is they didn’t get the proper permits. The work was done and because it was never inspected now in order to have it inspected, it’s held to the current code and what you did 10 years ago may have met code if you would have got a permit then, but now it doesn’t. Very expensive and a heartbreaker. Yeah, similar with me. People will tend to look online for solutions for their garage door problems, like if the cable snapped or the spring is broken and attempt to do it themselves, and what people don’t realize is those springs are under sometimes a thousand pounds of pressure, and it’s very dangerous and so I always tell people you should never operate or handle your spring without a professional, and in fact you should never even touch it. You should always have a professional handle that. It’s very important because those things are very dangerous and then you can get seriously injured. So again, don’t be hero for that, call someone who knows what they’re doing. Alright, my last question to you Kevin. When is a good time for a homeowner to call and upgrade their electrical system? Well, if you suspect you have a problem, don’t wait, because you know plugs, receptacles in your home, they just don’t stop working. We get calls like that. "Oh I have a plug that stopped working." Well, something’s going on there, so if you suspect you’re having a problem in your home, we have links flickering, noises coming from your walls, from the electrical panel, smells that shouldn’t be there.. and burning electrical smell is a big one. Is there any sort of like timeframe, like an average time frame, where someone should upgrade their electrical panel? Like a certain amount of years or something like that? You know, if you’ve got a home that’s pre-1990, definitely time to consider getting the panel inspected because your electrical panel, really your whole electric service, is no different than your roof, your furnace, your hot water tank – your garage door –your garage door. These these things all wear out over time even though you don’t really see anything going on in that electrical panel because there’s no moving parts to it. There is a lot going on there and and it does where out, so if you’ve got a home build in the 80s or older, time to get a professional in to have a look at the electrical panel and do an inspection for you, any advice we need. Yeah, I always tell people for the garage door, if it’s old older than 20 years old, it might be time to look at getting a new garage door. And for the opener the same sort of age applies, especially because technology is ever-changing so you should always keep in mind, specially for safety concerns, like for example, it’s not regulated to have those safety plugs in every home because we know that people tend to make mistakes and put the wrong thing in an electrical socket and end up hurting it. So things like that are very simple in their garage door side. Make sure your safety centres are operational. Make sure that the down force on your motor is secure and not gonna hurt anyone if it happens to come down on someone or something. And your garage door should be inspected every two years. Kevin I see brought some props.Would you like to share with the rest of us what you brought? Absolutely. So in talking with, talking about the receptacle upgrades in your home, sometimes we run into situations where due to a bad connection at the plug like this, things get really hot. And I see it a lot in basements where it’s an older home and people are using plug in space heaters to keep the basement warm, and with devices like space heaters, they draw a lot of power. So when you have a worn out plug with a bad connection and you’re running a lot of electricity through, it can actually melt. So I don’t know if the audience can see, but it’s a little bit crispy, a little bit on the brown side. Probably wouldn’t want to use this in your home. And this is this is the extreme. Most people don’t let it get to this point. We took this out of a house not too long ago where they were they were plugging in a heater into this plug right to the point where it just stopped working. And thank god it did, because for it to actually deform like this under the heat, you can imagine what was going on there. Kevin thank you so much for joining me today and where can people find you? Well, we definitely want you to visit our website halo power.ca. You can find us on Facebook on Instagram, or give us a call at 7809950359 And Garage Door Fans, you know where you can find us, at CW Canada Garage Doors. www.cwgarage.ca, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. As always when your door’s in trouble, you call C&W!