Electrical Installation Tips

A German industry organization has practical tips on electrical installations for those who are building new or remodeling. A new brochure from Elektro+ points out that it is five times as expensive to install switches, outlets, and lighting fixtures after the fact than it is to install them initially. Hence, too many of them is better than too few.

Other tips in the brochure include:

• If outlets are needed outdoors for such purposes as electric grills, pumps or lawnmowers, they should, for safety reasons, be switched on from the inside.
• Appliances that consume a lot of power, such as electric stoves, washers or water heaters should have separate circuits with their own fuses. Otherwise they shouldn’t be used simultaneously.
• There should be smoke detectors in every room, and they should be interlinked so that one knows in the bedroom, for example, that fire has broken out in the basement.
• There should be a temperature control in each room, adjusted for specific needs. This reduces heating costs and energy consumption. This way the temperature can be lowered in a room, such as the bedroom, that isn’t used during the day. On the other hand, a room such as the bathroom can be preheated before it is entered in the morning.

Ted Shoemaker, an American, first went to Germany as an Army officer, married a German woman and stayed on as a writer/editor. Now retired and based in Frankfurt, he keeps his hand in by acting as a correspondent for a number of American magazines.