New Year’s Resolutions: Improve Your Home

A new year is a great chance to start over, and this year, throughout the month of January, we’re taking a closer look at a few ways you can resolve to improve your life by improving your electrical system. These New Year’s resolutions are designed to be simple, straightforward, and easy for nearly anyone to do, especially with the help of a professional. This week, we’re taking a look at how you can resolve to make your life better by improving your home, specifically with your electrical equipment.

Improve Your Lighting

One way to improve your overall quality of life is to give your home a fresh, new look that makes you fall in love with it all over again. There may be no better way to give a space a facelift than by changing how it is lit. Improving your lighting improves visibility, increases beauty, highlights the features in the room you want to accentuate, and generally makes you feel better about your home at all times of the day. Even during dark hours, having brilliant, well-tuned lighting can make a home shine and feel filled with life while many others might feel sleepy and dull.

Improving lighting also helps you improve your quality of life by reducing the amount of money you’re spending on energy. Poor lighting sucks a lot of energy away and that, in turn, costs a fair amount of money. However, brighter and more vibrant LED lighting is also more energy-efficient, and that in turn saves you money and helps you grow that savings account for something you really want (something many people also resolve to do every January). If you’re looking for an investment to make, there may be no better one for your home and your happiness than improving your lighting.

Add New Convenience

A 21^st century home should make use of 21^st-century technology, and 21^st-century technology is designed to add convenience. Homes make our lives easier and more accessible now than they ever have before, and they do so in ways you may have never considered or thought about before. Here are just a few examples of some ways you can make your electrical system even more convenient:

• USB Power Plugs: Smartphones are integral parts of our lives, and that means they need to be constantly topped up on battery. However, if you don’t have your charger brick that you normally use to plug your phone into an AC outlet, what are you to do? If you have a USB power outlet, it won’t matter. These outlets can be easily installed into nearly any existing wall receptacle for a standard AC outlet, only they also include one or two small slots for a USB power cable with DC current. This allows you to plug your phone into an outlet without a charging brick, freeing up the outlet for what you need while providing power wherever you need it.
• Standby generators: During a power outage, it’s a huge pain in the rear end to have to go out otto the garage, pull out the backup generator, get it started (which can be a chore in itself), and then correctly plug it in so that it can provide your home with the tiny amount of power it produces. With a standby generator, that’s a thing of the past. These systems turn on automatically during an outage, are powered by natural gas so they don’t need to be refueled, and provide an abundance of power so you can do more while the power is out. You don’t have to do a thing. Talk about convenience.

Automate Those Mundane Tasks

Finally, home automation is a rapidly growing and expanding industry as people look for more and more ways to take a hands-off approach to home life. Home automation allows you to do so many things without ever having to lift more than a finger, and that can make life more comfortable and convenient for you, even when you aren’t around. For example, home automation can automatically unlock the door when you get home, automatically turn on lights so you aren’t fumbling around in the dark, and automatically turn on the HVAC system so you’ll be comfortable. And it does all of this thanks to routines that are set up to trigger when you reach a certain distance away from your home.

Home automation can be as plentiful or as simple as you’d like. Some people go full-on into the automation sphere, creating automation networks that take care of so many different tasks for them. Others opt for a simpler approach and go with maybe one or two devices that they can set up and use easily. This functionality is entirely customizable to what you want, and there are plenty of different options on the market, allowing you to make a perfect choice.