Questions to ask your Electrician

Here's a list of questions to ask an electrician who you are considering for installing recessed lights. Sadly most of these I only realized after the job was done and mistakes were made.

Are you a licensed electrician? Ask for proof.

What brand of lights and trim do you use? It matters. The premier brands are Juno and Lightolier. Elite, Home Depot (Halo/Cooper) and several other makes are perfectly good. If you don't specify you might get some Chinese knockoffs. I do not recommend the Halo ALL-PRO trims that use bands instead of springs to secure the trim against the housing -- they are a pain to install/remove and the finish quality is not great. Remember trims, not housings, are what you'll see, so you might opt for something that has a quality finish. If you are particular, you should look at the trims in person. They can differ in color, finish, texture etc. from a catalog. Put model numbers, color, and quantity in the contract!

How do you make cuts for the cans? They should use a hole saw. If they cut them with a keyhole saw I'd run. The hole saw produces a perfect circle to fit snugly around the light housing. My electrician used a keyhole saw and produced holes that were not so round. The problem here is there is drywall cuts exposed around the trim, ugh, and the cans are not tight.

How do you ensure there is sufficient space for a can before cutting the hole? If they cut a hole and discover a pipe or other obstruction then you got an extra hole in the ceiling. They should use a wire thing to probe up there to determine if there's clearance.

Do you use a flex bit? An electrician on a fixed bid is incentivized to produce lots of holes in your walls/ceilings since they can work faster. Of course this sucks for you. Some electricians use a flex bit to minimize holes. Some will say flex bits are dangerous since you are drilling blindly and could hit a pipe or something bad. In either case you want an electrician that is experience in remodel, knows the tricks, and can produce the least number of holes.

How do you determine light placement? Some use lasers to align lights. Mine turned out pretty good in terms of placement and he only used a measuring tape. Placement can be highly subjective so I recommend you walk through and markup all the light placements if you're particular.

Do you use plastic tarps to protect furniture/etc from dust debris? Drywall will still find it's way through your house but insist on drop clothes.

Do you cleanup? Most probably won't and it will just take some vacuuming.

Are you going to haul away the debris? If you are replacing lots of old fixtures, you'll end up with a pile of junk to take to the dump. The electrician should take it with him.

And remember to put ALL the details in writing, in the contract!

Why I Don't Like Evaporative Coolers

At first I thought quite highly of my evaporative cooler (swamp cooler) but then I lived with it for a while. I'll start first with what I dislike about it.

• It doesn't have a thermostat. If I was to install one it would need to be some distance from the air vent to be effective. Unfortunately the control is directly underneath the vent so installing a thermostat would involve non trivial wiring. Due to the lack of a thermostat I generally have two options: 1. Let it run all night and wake up freezing or 2. Turn off before bed with not so cool temperature. I also question the practicality of a thermostat since if it turns on when there is no window open, the motor will strain and possibly overheat.
• You must have a window open during operation. The opening and closing of windows gets tiring. Of course the air only goes where there is an open window. Open the windows too much and hot air invades the house; too little and you strain the fan and limit cooling. It has to be just right for optimum cooling. This is a pain.
• It only works when the humidity is low. There's this thing called wet bulb temperature, which I won't attempt to explain here. The wet bulb temperature is what dictates the performance of the cooler. When the humidity and temperature rise, the capability of the cooler to cool diminishes. We've had plenty of humid stretches where the house is not being cooled and just gets humid ~60%RH, which is a danger zone for mold/mildew, not to mention at the fringe of comfort.
• Coolers require a fair amount of maintenance. The pads need to be replaced once per year. The pump filter often gets clogged with the aspen fibers. The basin collects all sorts of dead bugs and aspen fibers and needs to be cleaned out. The water shutoff sometimes doesn't shutoff at correct water level and overflows, wasting a tremendous amount of water until resolved. It requires winterizing in Fall and Spring activation, in most climates. The cooler, like most, is installed on the roof, which is an additional annoyance for maintenance.  This all adds up to a lot of maintenance for a relatively simple device.
• Noise: it's a bit noisy on high and rattles the ceiling
• It's quite breezy under the vent. Unlike an AC system, all the air of an evaporative cooler exits through one vent and the blast of air you get by walking under it is sometimes annoying. Additionally the floor under the vent is prone to excessing moisture - bad for wood floors.
• It's ugly and visible from the front of the house

What I like about it

• It does humidify the house. I like to keep it between 30-40%RH but sometimes it goes up to 60%
• It should in theory use less electricity than an AC unit but I have not been able to verify.
• It's nice to get fresh air in the house

Update Sept 2012 - I got AC and promptly had the Swamp Cooler removed. A roofing company removed it for only $250 and patched the roof.

Evaporative Cooler Pads: Aspen Vs. Spongy Synthetic

The house I bought came with an evaporative cooler. I thought this was the greatest invention of all time until I lived in the house for a while and had to deal with various maintenance anomalies.  More on that later. The cooler came with aspen pads (made with Aspen wood fiber). When winterizing the system I found all sorts of aspen fibers in the basin, clogging up the pump. I thought there must be a better, less primitive material. In the following Spring, I found DIAL DuraCool pads at HD (http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-100346714/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053&langId=-1&keyword=evaporative+cooler+pad&storeId=10051). These are basically a sponge like material. The manufacturer claims they are cooler than both paper and aspen, and can be cleaned and reused, so I decided to give them a try. They seemed to work ok but it's hard to know if they were cooler than the aspen pads since I had no measurement of the aspen pads under the same conditions (temperature, humidity). I've read that pads should be changed each year. Yesterday, being the hottest day of the year at 100F, I decided to replace the pads since the cooler wasn't performing well. This time I decided to try the AspenSnow aspen pads http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-100346409/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053&langId=-1&keyword=evaporative+cooler+pad&storeId=10051 Interestingly, they claim they are cooler than the synthetic pads and paper. They both seem to agree they are cooler than paper but I didn't read what the paper pads claim. Hands down the aspen pads perform significantly better. It was amazing how much colder the air was. Aside from better cooling, they moved much more air than the sponge pads. Today will be the first full day test with the pads and with a forecast high of upper 90's, I'm hoping it will keep the house in mid 70's. Interestingly, Wikipedia alludes to better performance of aspen pads due to the wood fiber soaking up the water, but that assertion is flagged with a "dubious" citation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler

130V vs 120V Halogen Lights

We recently had recessed lights installed in our kitchen and living room. We chose the gimbal style of trim since the ceiling is vaulted and eyeballs looks dated, IMO. Initially I was shocked by the lack of light they provided. The light was a yellowish hue, as if they were on a dimmer. I took out one of the bulbs and noticed they were 130V. What?? The US electrical system is 120V, so why 130V? I did a bit of reading and discovered this class of bulbs was introduced for power savings and longer life. The major downside is that you trade a little power savings for a lot less brightness. I found an article stating that 130V results in a 14% power savings but provides 25% less light! If we didn't need the extra light and were ok with the color it wouldn't be a problem, but we do. My electrician claimed ignorance. I ordered 120V bulbs from the same manufacturer (PAR30 Sylvania Capyslite). As expected the 120V lights were much brighter and white, not yellowish. These are only 50W, not 75W, since our ceiling could only support a shallow can which is only rated for a max of 50W. The 75W Halogens at 130V might be bright enough. The Halogens are still not as nice as the CFL R30s in the rest of the house in terms of light dispersion and brightness. The halogens have a glare to them that stings your eye a bit, whereas the CFLs produce a soft white, evenly distributed light. Of course the downside to CFLs is they take a while to reach full brightness. I haven't tried any incandescent R30s but will probably put a few in the hallway and other areas that don't stay on long enough to merit a CFL.