08 May LEDs and Ladder Safety
Yellowblue engineer Dennis Grubb takes a look at some common, but often forgotten, sources of excess heat in homes: incandescent light bulbs. Later, installer Eric Mortenson goes over the different kinds of ladders involved in LED installation, and their accompanying safety requirements.
Okay. Now we’re going to walk through the house and look at some really interesting parts of our home that you may never ever consider that would actually be bringing in heat into your home. It’s your incandescent light bulbs that you may currently have in your home.
Again, this is a thermal imaging camera. I’m going to show Darrell what type of temperatures that he’s looking at. So for example, these little pendant lights — I’m going to look inside here and measure the temperature of those pendant lights. It’s about 212 degrees. Can you see that? Those are all heaters.
Now these are the down lights he has in the kitchen. 250 degrees so six heaters in his house. So, the customer’s actually going to be running their air conditioner to try to cool off their home and if they keep these incandescent lights in their home, they’re actually are going to be fighting against each other. So we also recommend removing one hundred percent of all incandescent lamps from the home and replacing it with the energy-efficient LED lamps available from your yellowblue dealer.
I’d like to take a second and talk to you about the ladders and the different types of ladders that you’re going to need to carry with you — really on a daily basis.
Okay. Let’s start with just our standard six-foot stepladder. More often than not, you’re going to use this ladder to access scuttle holes or attic entrances inside a home. You’re going to want to keep this somewhere handy because you’re going to use that a lot.
Next, we recommend carrying either a versatile Little Giant ladder that can extend into a six-foot or an eight-foot ladder. Some guys just carry an 8-foot stepladder to help them reach the taller scuttle doors.
Lastly, everybody will need to be prepared to get up on the roofs, and in most situations, an eight-foot ladder and a six-foot stepladder are not adequate to safely get you onto many roofs. So, right here we’re looking at a 16-foot extension ladder. it goes all the way up to 16 feet and locks in and collapses down very easily and it’s very light and easy to use.
I just wanted to show you the proper way to use a Little Giant ladder. This thing is able to extend into an extension ladder, an 8-foot stepladder, and a six-foot stepladder. It’s kind of every ladder in one. So let me show you how to go ahead and use these.
Step one: there’s locking pins here, so we’re just going to go ahead and really release those pins and open the ladder into a basic step form. What we’re going to do is we’re only going to extend one side at a time, keeping two feet firmly planted on the ground at all time .There’s a pin on each side. We’ll go ahead and lock that in and then we’ll come over to our other side and do the same thing. I wanted to show you this because these are very handy ladders, but I see a lot of people struggling with opening and closing these ladders quite frequently. Most accidents happen on the last two steps of the ladder or setting them up and taking them down, so I just wanted to give you guys a couple quick hints on how to use these effectively.
We’re up here getting ready to get up on our roof so we can work on our solar fan, but I wanted to just cover one more thing about ladder safety and really about making sure we’re not causing any damage to anybody’s home any time we set up a ladder.
So Jason’s going to come up here and set up our extension ladder and I want to show you some things that we need to take into consideration. Jason’s got the ladder set up appropriately and it’s set up at an appropriate angle, but there’s one factor that we haven’t taken into consideration. Here, this ladder is only sitting on a gutter. As you can see, if I push on that with just a little bit of weight on my hands, you can see that it could cause some stress on the gutter and it could even bend and collapse this gutter. What I wanted to show you is, although when you set a ladder up and it might seem rigid, you really need to inspect your gutters before you go setting a person’s body weight, carrying tools on them. Carrying a fan can really stress this gutter. We don’t want to make any more work for ourselves or make any homeowners unhappy by damaging their gutters or roof systems.
We’re going to find a different place to put this ladder up appropriately.
We want to give you another helpful hint when you’re using ladders on a customer’s home. You can see that the shingle is overhanging the drip edge on this home and if I were to put my ladder up and put my bodyweight on that ladder, there’s a real good chance we could cause damage to those and brand-new shingles. So, Jason’s got a two by six here and we can go ahead and we could go up here. We would attach a two by six here to kick this out and protect the shingles and protect the fascia. We would take two screws and screw that in and then we would go back and just use a little touch-up paint on the fascia clamps would work good.
