Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Removal of electrical panel covers isn’t a topic that gets talked about enough when it comes to electric maintenance and safety. The truth is that as an industry we’ve gotten into the bad habit (yes, I said it) of opening electrical panels for visual inspection when they are energized or “hot”, as a standard practice. I was recently explaining this to a customer who was shocked to hear that this practice in some instances actually goes against electrical safety standards . Now, it’s not that this customer was inexperienced or uninformed about electrical safety procedures, it was just a classic case of, “that’s the way it’s always been done, so it must be right.” Right ? There are a lot of inherent risks when you take off a panel cover because you don’t know what’s behind it. Removing the cover exposes energized parts and conductors,  posing a serious risk of shock, nuisance tripping or arc flash explosion. The National Fire Protection Agency’s (NFPA) electrical safety standard 7...

New Surveillance Court Orders Show That Even Judges Have Difficulty Understanding and Limiting Government Spying In the United States, a secret federal surveillance court approves some of the government’s most enormous, opaque spying programs. It is near-impossible for the public to learn details about these programs, but, as it turns out, even the court has trouble, too.  According to new opinions obtained by EFF last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) struggled to get full accounts of the government’s misuse of its spying powers for years. After learning about the misuse, the court also struggled to rein it in. In a trio of opinions, a judge on the FISC raised questions about unauthorized surveillance and potential misuse of a request he had previously granted. In those cases, the secrecy inherent in the proceedings and the government’s obfuscation of its activities made it difficult for the court to grasp the scope of the problems and to prevent them...