EleBlog

31 Mar, 2009

Via HousingZone.com comes this 5-page PDF from FMI Corp., the construction industry's leading consulting firm. It contains "100 ways to cut costs," and it's down-and-dirty, not wordy. 

31 Mar, 2009

I charted the two serious electrical (and other) contracting stocks vs. the S&P 500 via www.bigcharts.com. When it comes to my investments, I think "relative performance' is a bag of crap. However, relatively speaking, EMCOR Group (the blue line) has seriously "outperformed" the S&P 500 (the brownish/beige line) over the past year. Essentially, the stock of IESC (black lines) has, at this point, shadowed the S&P 500 -- after periods of outperformance AND underperformance.



I went back to BigCharts and asked it to show me prices over the past 3 months. In that time period, IESC stock has outperformed by turning in a precisely FLAT performance (the stock hasn't moved, net, in three months' time). The S&P 500 is down 15% since the year started; EMCOR is down 30%.

31 Mar, 2009

Every once in a while, people who do electrical work need to be reminded that -- if they're not already -- they should be making use of thermal imaging. 

31 Mar, 2009

. . . that's the headline on a 6/08 article from Home Technology E-Magazine, by the formidable Grayson Evans.  (More)

31 Mar, 2009

CIRE magazine offers a short (but sweet) article on keeping construction costs down via modular. 

31 Mar, 2009

If you keep half an eye on the wireless/datacom market, as I do, it may seem (as it does to me) that you've been hearing about WiMax for a longer period of time than you've been hearing about Hillary Clinton.

Electronic House magazine contributes this article on "more robust wireless service, greater reliability and power." Read through to the end of the article, however, where there's a section headed "Lingering Questions." The answers are positive, according to the magazine.

29 Mar, 2009

Lighting retrofits are THE thing that this country needs. We are wasting a lot of kilowatts to provide light (in many case, out-of-date insufficient light!) to office buildings and elsewhere. This is not just "Green," it's goshdarn common sense.

Consulting-Specifying ENgineer recently ran a feature from a Pittsburgh engineer on Retrofititing Office Lighting Controls. Among other things, the writer talked about occupancy sensors:

Think about that. A room which is occupied less than 6 hours a day provides a better-than-3-year payback on a occupancy sensor. Why the heck aren't these everywhere? 

29 Mar, 2009

A "guest opinion" piece in the March/April issue of EnergyBiz magazine was written by Dr. Charles Gay, who is the chief honcho at the solar group of Applied Materials. You can read it (PDF) here. After reading it, this piece stuck in my head:


In other words: We can increase solar production (and Dr. Gay's company would make money). We can't keep saying "it can't do it" when it's just possible that it can.
 (More)

29 Mar, 2009

E-J Electric Installation Co., one of the oldest electrical contractors around (founded 1899) -- and one of the most sophisticated contracting firms these days -- has started up E-J Energy Services. See some info on it here.

I have the press release in front of me. It says:

29 Mar, 2009

Interesting article on CE Pro's site last month, 9 Challenges Builders Face When Using Integrators. It's about home technology, of course. CE Pro is in favor of integrators and ambivalent (you might say) about electrical contractors.

Home builders are the integrators' potential customers. They do, of course, use electrical contractors (who are, quite often, called "my electrician" by the builders).

Item #7 from the "9 challenges" is:

Item #7 from the "9 challenges" is:

Jason Knott, the editor of CE Pro, is a great editor (and writer). But he omitted one thing: Most people who build things (home builders, general contractors, A/E firms, construction managers, owners handling a project as primes) like to minimize the number of contractors with which they deal.

For one thing, more entities in a project adds complication. For another, the more $$$ you can do with fewer contracting entities, the more each entity is focused on you and your needs.

If a given project is worth $50,000 to an electrical contractor, it's one thing; if it's worth $85,000, it's another thing. I think that goes for all kinds of contractors. It's not a mystery. From the CE Pro/integrator side of the story, it doesn't necessarily look that way (as electricians and "alarm guys" don't, in theory, know what they are doing).

But that's the story, I think.

29 Mar, 2009

PowerBeam, a company that ostensibly pursuing wireless electricity, provided an update (here). The article itself is shorter than the online comments (47 of 'em).


 

26 Mar, 2009

If you go by railroad volumes, when they get around to estimating the decline in U.S. GDP in the first quarter of 2009, the numbers could be quite scary. Read this brief weekly report from the American Association of Railroads.

Too afraid to click over? Well then, just digest this disgusting slice:


Yike!

26 Mar, 2009

Co Star Group (which does a bang-up job of "covering" real estate) did an interview on ENERGY STAR with Alyssa Quarforth, who handles Commercial Buildings for the EPA in the program. Here's a really neat Q and A --


EleBlog take: Green building stuff has got to become more "realistic." Buildings that "perform" (i.e., use a lot less energy) -- not neat designs and superb "intent" -- ought to be the goal.

26 Mar, 2009

McGraw-Hill Construction said Feb. construct starts fell 8% from January (and big-time from February 2008).

Now Reed Construction Data says there was a "slight" slip (quantified as a 10.4% decline) from February 2008 to February 2009.

I'm confused.

Here's commentary by Jim Haughey, the Reed construction economist . . . a short-term prediction:

 
Download the 6-page PDF here. 

25 Mar, 2009

Annually, the Consumer Electronics Assn. offers "5 Technology Trends to Watch." This year's 25-page PDF document, downloadable free, covers this ground:

25 Mar, 2009

A "data center industry group," AFCOM, has a think tank -- the Data Center Institute. Here are 5 predictions for the future of the data center, as reported recently on GreenerComputing.com:

25 Mar, 2009

It's my strong belief that the U.S. government is going to have to SHRINK in the (near-term) years to come. When I voice this belief, folks tell me it will never happen. Of course, that's what they said about today's financial environment, and the ever-declining value of houses -- and I was right about that!

In leafing through a presentation on the Public Buildings Service (a unit of the General Services Administration), one slide notes that the GSA had 40,000+ employees in the 1970s, and has 12,500 employees now. Over that time, the "portfolio" of federally owned buildings (and space leased by federal agencies) has only increased.

Today, the PBS is responsible for 8,500 buildings, more or less, with a gross space under roof of about 347 million sq. ft. These buildings are located in 2,100 U.S. communities; they house 1 million federal workers who labor for 60 agencies. The PBS estimates that it would take $42.7 billion to replace the buildings under its care.

Perhaps a surprise: A pie chart shows the Top 10 Agencies with space under roof. According to this, 17% of the space houses Justice Department operations (of course, GSA has nothing to do with the Defense Department, which has its own real estate/construction operations).

Spending: GSA/PBS requested $722 million for repairs and alterations in fiscal 2008, with another $531 million for construction & acquisition of buildings.

If you're a contractor looking to do biz with GSA/PBS, go to www.fedbizopps.gov.

25 Mar, 2009

Wireless waves penetrate, unless they are stopped (and they are, of course, all around us!). BUT, according to an item from CSE magazine, Japanese researchers

23 Mar, 2009

Here's what the American Institute of Architects had to say about its 3/20 posting of the latest update in its monthly "work on the boards" survey data:

. . . the period of steepest declines may be nearing its end. The AIA’s Architecture Billings Index moved up two points in February to 35.3. While still pointing to reduced workloads, this score indicates some moderation in the downturn. Even more encouraging is the increase in the index for new project inquiries.

The inquiries index has moved up more than 10 points since December, and the February reading of 49.5 suggests that the downturn in project inquiries is stabilizing.


 (More)

23 Mar, 2009

The folks at Housing Zone pulled out some stops in a story about "an environmentally friendly custom modular home." At the link, you'll find:


Interesting slice:


Phil's interview is one of the podcasts.

23 Mar, 2009

A short but potent story on the Consulting-Specifying Engineer site notes that business owners need to pay attention to transformers. Among the reasons:

1. A business owner may assume the power transformer(s) on his/her/its site is the responsibility of the utility company. NOT ALWAYS THE CASE.

2. It may be assumed that when the transformer goes bad, insurance will cover it. This might NOT be the case, if you've completely disregarded maintenance.

23 Mar, 2009

In a recent post, I noted the trade magazines that were pulling back (to electronic-only status, which may be a stop along the way to death). I ran across another this weekend, Financial Week. It was a print publication AND a website. Now, it's nothing. It's too bad: It was an interesting read. 

23 Mar, 2009

"Zero-Emission City in the Desert" is a 13-minute video (Technology Review site -- that's the magazine from MIT) on a solar test field in Masdar City.  (More)

23 Mar, 2009

You can't make this stuff up -- this is a Plug-In Dinner Plate. More here.

21 Mar, 2009

A neat Retail Traffic article talks about the how and the when of shutting off the electricity for retailers vacating a space. It includes this:

If this strikes you as "basic blocking and tackling," well -- it is!!! But just read the article linked above. A lot of stuff "falls through the cracks" -- and much of it goes out the door with dollar signs attached.  (More)

21 Mar, 2009

A blogger posted "Top 10 Tidbits" from the NFM+T show, held last week in Baltimore. In the next three weeks, TEDMAG.com will post three columns I've written based on what I heard and saw at the show (with photos taken by me and slides from some of the presentations).

For the time being, the Tidbits post will have to do. I really DO agree with #4 (one of the columns coming up talks about what Craig Sheehy had to say).

And: I heartily endorse the content of item #3.

21 Mar, 2009

A nitty-gritty look, from Consulting-Specifying Engineer magazine, at a niche within a niche (within a niche?). 

21 Mar, 2009

A crosswalk in Seattle illuminated at night ("Crosswalk 2.0, says TreeHugger). 

21 Mar, 2009

A 12-page PDF from the SEIA (a solar association) puts 2008 solar photovoltaic installs at 1,265 mW, up a bit from 2007's 1,159 mW. That's about 2,400 mW installed over a 24-month period, taking the U.S. to 8,775 mW of installed PV capacity.

Bottom line: It ain't much.

18 Mar, 2009

You might have noticed that the Rocky Mountain News stopped printing (it was a daily newspaper). Other daily papers have gone bankrupt. The daily newspaper business is starting to waste away; death might take decades, but the attrition in information sources is going to hurt.

Yes, yes, people don't read print anymore, they get their news on the Internet. Sure. But who the heck is going to WRITE the news, if not trained journalists?

Yes, yes, there are blogs. But damn few bloggers are good at what they do. And they get things wrong. The huge brouhaha over Dan Rather, in 2004, for example, was a big noise about almost nothing -- and the bloggers got it WRONG.

- - - - -

Well, in my small corner of the world, trade magazines (my first "true love" in business) are going kerplooey. Stuff that's come to light just since New Year's Day:

LIGHTWAVE -- a magazine in the Fiber Optics business: Going electronic ONLY.

INDUSTRIAL DISTRIBUTION -- going to 6x/year from 12x/year.

CABLING BUSINESS -- going electronic ONLY.

ARCHI-TECH -- a neat magazine. No more printing. Shifting to 52-times-yearly (weekly) electronic version.

- - - - -

In an even smaller corner of the world, ELECTRICAL, there is this:

1. I apologize for this, but I can't remember which -- either Electrical Products & Solutions or Electrical Contracting Business is going to cease print publishing.

2.It's not publishing, but if it happens, it sucks: Rumors are reaching me that Electric West, being held this week in Las Vegas, might not be repeated.

18 Mar, 2009

The post directly below updates Housing Starts data. But the recently posted TEDMAG.com column, all about construction data, puts (all in one place) a lot of hard-to-find AND you-won't-find-it-elsewhere data on construction, employment, and the economy.  (More)

18 Mar, 2009

Jim Haughey, the construction economist at Reed Construction Data, is frequently quoted here. I liked ALL of what he had to say in his 3/17 blog post, especially including this paragraph:

18 Mar, 2009

February housing starts were reported 3/17 and, appropriate to the day itself, there was a bunch of blarney in what ensued:

a. Housing starts were reported as increasing dramatically from January.

b. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared in response.

c. I saw an "analyst" on BloombergTV recommend going into retail stocks.

- - - - -

OK. Here are some facts to go with the heaping helping of nonsense:

1. Anyone who knows anything easily identified this as a BLIP, not the bottom. Here's a report from Multi-Housing News that totally demolishes a positive spin on the report in just a few paragraphs. Be sure to re-read (a few times) the sentence about building permits; it says there might be WORSE yet coming on the housing-starts-news front.

2. Check out this Marketwatch.com story on mortgage rates. THEY might have bottomed (although I don't believe this story is credible, read it -- I could be wrong, you know).

AND

- - - - -

3. Just to check on my instincts, I went back on did some research on SINGLE-FAMILY housing starts in January and February. Why?

- multi-family housing starts, which caused the February "blip," are notoriously volatile. 1-Family starts ain't!

- 1-family starts matter a lot more, in the end, to the construction industry AND the national economy. You build a new house, you buy a lot of stuff. If someone buys the new house, he/she/they MOVE from an existing house. 1-family construction was a pillar of the economy in recent years (although it was more important in the 2000s than in most prevoius decades, I think).

- I thought an historical perspective, at least from recent history, would be valuable. This kind of stuff, believe it or not, is NEVER reported by the mainstream media. I don't know why, the research I did to put this together took 3 friggin' minutes!!!



What's the bottom line on these numbers? Draw your own conclusions!!! The specific data on January and February 2009 are as follows:

January: 22,400         February 24,600

. . . that's a statistical rounding error, for Heaven's sake -- not an indicator of the bottom.

- - - - -

FINAL NOTE: February 2009 might actually HAVE been the bottom, for all we can know at this moment. But there's no reason to declare it a bottom, or jump the gun and recommend retail stocks. It is my fervent belief that the guy who appeared on TV recommending retail stocks on St. Patrick's Day:

1. Needs to get a new job, parking cars for a living.

2. Might have been drunk, for perhaps weeks.

3. Most importantly, such a stupid thing, said outloud into a microphone in front of a camera, indicates that the national wave of speculation is NOT over, and that we have further to go on the downside in the stock market.

When we are REALLY at the bottom in stocks, a responsible entity (i.e., this guy's employer -- or the guy himself) and BloombergTV itself won't put such idiotic recommendations in front of the public.

In other words: When you hear NO ONE recommending stocks, and the wounded are quietly seeing to their bandages and nursing their injuries, THAT might be the moment to buy.

But not one minute before.
 (More)

16 Mar, 2009

This blog post (on the Energy Matters blog) outlines $50B in energy spending in the Stimulus legislation. A slice:

16 Mar, 2009

OLED = organic light-emitting diode, a technological variant of the LED that's goinna be BIG in lighting.



The graphic above is from a research firm's report that says OLED sales will be $6 billion in 2018.

LED lighting is coming. It's going to be a major change for electrical contractors and the distributors who sell to them. The EleBlog can have no idea if this research report is correct, but it is (obviously, from the graphic above) pointing in the direction of Market Disruption.

16 Mar, 2009

Changes to the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design program (from the U.S. Green Building Council) are presented in a semi-entertaining presentation downloadable from the blog REAL LIFE LEED. It's worth your time to click on that link and, from there, download the presentation. 

16 Mar, 2009

Dr. Housing Bubble, a blog about the economy that's usually interesting, says in a lengthy missive posted yesterday that California is going to be in a recession until 2011. He provides copious documentation. 

16 Mar, 2009

EleBlog had a post about wind turbine maintenance last month. Here's something new, about a training program in California. 

16 Mar, 2009

McGraw-Hilll Construction's February pulse-taking shows the $ value of construction starts down 45% in the year's first two months. That's essentially the same reading as MHC provided in January:

YEAR-TO-DATE CONSTRUCTION STARTS
Unadjusted Totals, In Millions of Dollars

	2 Mo. 2009	2 Mo. 2008	% Change
Nonresidential Building	$23,152	$47,582	-51
Residential Building	12,950	28,485	-55
Nonbuilding Construction	16,598	19,133	-13
Total Construction	$52,700	$95,200	-45

 

EleBlog take: The fall in nonresidential building is STUNNING.

See the MHC update here. Note that the "headline" is that construction start dollar values fell 8% -- from the monthe earlier (Jan 2009). The numbers above compare Jan-Feb 2009 with Jan-Feb 2008.

15 Mar, 2009

Here's what Gregory Kenny, president/CEO of General Cable, had to saw (in a 2/11 conference call with Wall Street analysts, one of whom was named Celeste) about WIND POWER -- some relevant and interesting stuff:

- - - - -

I think the bigger, the big driver for us Celeste is really the... I guess is 29 states or so that now have green mandates. And again Obama, the 20% target for 2025 you begin to look at if indeed we go do that and we do it through solar and wind.

We've been building 5,000 megawatts to 8,300 megawatts a year in wind. And in order to get to that kind of number, you need to go to 12,000 to 18,000 per year. And with the stimulus goal, it does have is some language around $8 billion for renewable loan guarantees and also $6.5 billion to build new transmission systems. Just to scale that again we don't know precisely, but we think roughly transmission spend in the U.S. is about $10 billion a year, and that's the entire project from land write-aways to towers to labor to cable and some of the pole line hardware and other items and cable might be 5% of that $10 billion.

So when he says or when the Senate Bill for example says $6.5 billion again we think that will, that's a big number could be two-thirds of a year. But the much bigger numbers are tied to what needs to be done and there is a bit of number of reports including one out in the Wall Street Journal this earlier this week, the number is a $100 billion plus kinds of numbers.

So I think this will help hope for our demand, we saw 2009 as a slower year because of some of the financing vehicles having dried up. Lehman was active in that GE and we saw that as a slower year, 2009 falling back to sort of 2006 levels. This could help hold it at 2008 levels on terms of win.

Transmission as we said was very slow in the first half of '08. It began to pick up in the fourth quarter. This will help may be enable some projects to get financed obviously its way more complicated in that as you need write-aways and there's hearings and other things and FERC is really not exercise it's eminent domain powers that came from the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

But net, net it's important I think it could help what might have been a weaker 2009, relative to 2008 in wind and may accelerate some of the transmission. But we're really playing for the green mandates and again we look at headlines that everyday there are alternative projects, some funded some unfunded, some talked about, but they are big numbers.

But to go to 20% green in the U.S. will put big demand on our undersea medium voltage cable plant that we're going into in Germany and that just won some wind farm orders there and clearly will help our medium voltage business, the transmission were well prepared for that.

Again, last year was a disappointment, we talked about hundreds of billions of work to be done in transmission for a first world grid and it's really only happened a tiny bit meaning we have just, in the last couple of years begun to pick up spending, saw a slowdown in our way and this may help.

So I think this language may be helps '09 and '10 which might have been tougher years, to sort of hold at '07, '08 levels but I don't think it's the big catalyst which is really so far 29 states that have green mandates.

15 Mar, 2009

Some interesting data from the distributors who sell to electrical (and other) contractors:

 (More)

15 Mar, 2009

A 2/19 article on the NY Times site is headlined "low-tech fixes for high-tech problems." Here's one of them, which completely knocked me out:

Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.

Mr. Pozar explains, “You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works.” Using your head can extend the key’s wireless range by a few car lengths.

15 Mar, 2009

NEMA makes available a "smart grid funding discussion" video -- and provides a transcript. 

15 Mar, 2009

GE recently rolled out the Energy Smart CFL -- old (12/15/08) story here. The company has a savings calculator here. 

12 Mar, 2009

CALCTP is an acronym for a training program on lighting + energy efficiency in California. I first heard about it at last year's NECA Show. Here's a release that talks about it (although the release source is NOT the creator of CALCTP) -- and here's a paragraph of interest:

12 Mar, 2009

Turner Construction says Q1 2009 construction costs are DOWN 5.77% compared with Q4 2008. More here.

Turner, owned by a German contracting firm, is the largest general contractor in the U.S.
 (More)

12 Mar, 2009

Some of us really hate the twice-yearly fooling with clocks. I have to believe that there are more traffic accidents, lost productivity, and more disasters resulting from screwing with the internal clocks of hundreds of millions of human beings.

However, the Department of Energy says otherwise -- at least when it comes to energy:


Here's the PDF of the DoE report. I'll have to read it and see if anyone else has analyzed this idiotic concept to find actual real-world "results."

12 Mar, 2009

I've been attending the National Facilities Maintenance & Technology show the past few days (in Baltimore). I've heard a lot, and some of it will end up (eventually) here somewhere.

Among other things, I've heard:


I have this picture of older Americans (there are a lot of us) squinting to read what's printed out on recycled copy paper in substandard ambient light. I know that "vision" is an overreaction.

Yet I've had experience with this. Once, upon presenting a report to a group of clients -- printed on recycled paper -- I got a lecture about not being so damn cheap. The client delivering the lecture worse glasses and had a problem seeing what was printed on the paper.

And on the CFL front, I've previously written how difficult it was for my wife (who has vision problems) to read using light from an expensive floorlamp I purchased (which came with a CFL pre-installed).

. . . so perhaps my "vision" is not so damn stupid.

12 Mar, 2009

Economist Jim Haughey of Reed Construction Data does NOT seem (to me) to have a political agenda. Maybe he does. Having heard him speak over the years, and read what he's written in various Reed magazines, I consider him an honest broker.

It's possible I'm wrong.

He recently posted an analysis of the new Obama plan for Housing on his blog. Here's the final paragraph:

EleBlog take: I'm not ready to substitute Jim's opinion for mine. But I've not done enough reading about the Housing plan (or previous plans now defunct) to form an opinion. Assuming Jim is talking with a concern first for construction (rather than politics) -- the verdict above is NOT good.

11 Mar, 2009

Over at GreenerBuildings.com, a neat piece (kinda long, but worth your time) goes into the hysteria over Green Jobs. I'm taking several paragraphs from it below, but it's longer (and adds additional food for thought):

10 Mar, 2009

This is Mosha. She's all of 3 years old. More than 2 years ago, this gentle sweet little creature's right front leg was blown off by a land mine.

Bad, bad humans!

But a human fitted her with that artificial leg. It works. It lets her do what she needs to do to be an elephant. She loves it! And the other elephants aren't creeped out by the thing -- they've accepted her.

Story here.

- - - - -

A note on what this is doing here: When I named this "The EleBlog" back in mid-2005, it was "about" electricity, but the name left room for me to pursue -- here and there -- my interest in elephants. Well, this is one of those times. There have been, with this one, 13 posts in 3.5+ years about elephants.

I hope those who do not share my passion for these creatures can cut me some slack and move on to the next item!

10 Mar, 2009

Facility Care magazine, which is about health care facilities, has an Ezine. A recent short article lists one dozen ways to save energy -- "quick fixes." Simple stuff.

By EleBlog's reckoning, numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are about lighting. And #11 is about using occupancy sensors for HVAC.

10 Mar, 2009

Cisco has rolled out a new 802.11n AP (list price: $1,299) that seeks to resolve a problem "with insufficient power" when using Power-over-Ethernet connections, according to a Network World write-up. 

10 Mar, 2009

You'll have to read this post carefully. It's about how LEED might have someone design a parking lot lighting deal and safety. I'm not sure it's accurate. It's been up on the site, We Light, for four months and attracted zero comments (which may not mean anything). 

10 Mar, 2009

From an article in the Asheville Citizen-Times (2/8/09), one more thing I didn't know:

"Porch ceilings in the 19th century were traditionally painted sky blue, which supposedly discourages flying insects from nesting and keeps away evil spirits."

10 Mar, 2009

"Modular homes are the ultimate prefabricated building system," says the intro on this webpage, which has a video on modular construction from the Natl. Assn. of Home Builders.

08 Mar, 2009

The Census Bureau's construction "put in place" report on January, a/k/a "construction spending," came out last Monday. Here are noteworthy items:

Total Not Seasonally Adjusted:

January 2009          $65.60 billion

January 2008          $75.66 billion

January 2007          $81.16 billion

2-year decline  19.2%

1-year decline  13.3%

- - - - -

January 2009 details:

Private Residential  DOWN 28.5%

Private NONresidential    UP 0.1%

Public Construction UP 2.8%

- - - - -

EleBlog comment: The January unadjusted numbers for NONresidential show hotel construction up marginally and office up 2.7% vs. January 2008. I don't believe this is going to continue.

08 Mar, 2009

National unemployment was put at 8.1% in the BLS report for February (it was assessed at 7.6% in January). Some other notable datapoints tucked into the news:

From Associated Press:

More than 2.9 million people were seeking jobs for 27 weeks or more in February, the Labor Department said Friday, up from the year-ago tally of 1.3 million. Last month's total is the highest on records dating to 1948, though adjusted for the size of the work force the numbers were much worse in the early 1980s.


From Bloomberg.com

The Labor Department today reported 639,000 first-time unemployment applications, the fifth straight week above 600,000. The agency also said worker productivity, a measure of employee output per hour, fell at a 0.4 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2008. Separate data showed factory orders slumped.


Another from AP:

Tolling grimly higher, the recession snatched more than 650,000 Americans' jobs for a record third-straight month in February as unemployment climbed to a quarter-century peak of 8.1 percent and surged toward even more wrenching double digits. The human carnage from the recession, well into its second year, now stands at 4.4 million lost jobs. About 12.5 million people are searching for work -- more than the population of Pennsylvania.

Additional data from BLS:

EleBlog take: All of this data harvesting sent me to the original BLS press release on February employment. Here are some raw data:

People employed in February 2008, not seasonally adjusted: 144,550,000. Employed in February 2009, n-s-a: 140,105,000.

Unemployed: February 2008, 7,953,000. February 2009: 13,699,000.

Final note on this one: The actual number of UNEMPLOYED people given in the Feb. 2009 report is 12,467,000, not the higher number shown above. Reason: These numbers are "adjusted" by the BLS economists. Let's go with 12,467,000, OK?
- - - - -

Persons at work PART-TIME for economic reasons:

February 2008 = 5,119,000. February 2009 = 9,170,000.

What this means: These are people who would take a full-time job, but can't find one.

- - - - -

Persons not working but "Marginally attached" to the labor force:

February 2008 = 1,585,000. February 2009 = 2,051,000.

What this means: These are people who could have worked but didn't in the week of the national employment survey. They are NOT counted among the unemployed.


EleBlog Conclusion: BLS gives the February 2009 civilian labor force as 154,214,000. That puts the "true" unemployment rate at 15.36%.

 (More)

08 Mar, 2009

Again using BLS data, here's what we can now about employment in electrical contracting:

a. BLS is always one month "behind" in subcontractor data. So the report this past week revealed January 2009 data for the first time; it is subject to revision.

b. This is "production employees" -- the guys and gals who do the work in the field. It omits overhead people.

c. To get a two-month picture, we have to look at data from December 2008.

Here's how it looks:


Yes, the best numbers were put up in Dec 2000/Jan 2001, as shown. While construction may have set monthly records in Jan-Feb 2007, that didn't happen in electrical contracting.

Field employment in electrical contracting --

08 Mar, 2009

Checking the Bureau of Labor Statistics database on construction employment (all sectors, production workers), here's what I learned:

a. Numbers for January and February 2009 are subject to revision (Jan. will get one more revision, Feb. is likely to get two).

b. Looking over the historical table, the record employment in the industry in those 2 months happened just two years ago, in Jan-Feb 2007.

c. Employment in Jan-Feb 2009 has quickly fallen to the level last seen in the year 2003 (in which construction was recovering from a recession).

d. I used NOT SEASONALLY ADJUSTED numbers. These are the real deal.

Here are the numbers:



What this means:


Compared with the 2007 peak year (ever) for these two months:

05 Mar, 2009

From NECA. Free. It's #4 in a series. 

05 Mar, 2009

As of a March 4 posting, David Bodamer's running tally of retail store closures (in just 2009) is at "1,764 closures out of 3,111 potentially affected U.S. stores." 

05 Mar, 2009

I recently discovered something called E&E TV -- which has been around since 2005 (I'm just catching up). It's


A recent segment talked about the $11 billion in Smart Grid funding in the stimulus package.

Neat aspect: They post the video online AND a transcript. This link takes you to the transcript; you can click and watch the video instead (or in addition). From the interviewee, Jay Birnbaum:

05 Mar, 2009

With the economy putting a strangle hold on many, it's not a bad time to go back to basics. HomeToys.com in Feb. ran a piece by Grayson Evans (I've complimented him here previously) on Job Site Tips.

Lots of common sense here:

Tip #2 -- tell everyone exactly what's to be done before going to the job. "It is way more distracting to do this at the job."

Tip #8 -- "Ask questions! Don't assume someone else on the job knows what's going on!"

There are actually more than 16 tips here (several are numbered 1, 2, and 3 -- which isn't as confusing in the article as it seems as I type it). One neat "additional" tip is "How to use a checklist."

05 Mar, 2009

An item on the BD&C website says the Modular Building Institute is eyeballing $11 billion in federal stimulus dollars. Here's an interesting couple of sentences:

05 Mar, 2009

TEDMAG.com today posted the latest "Special Report" by yours truly, on how to put the stimulus to work for you. It's a "service" editorial, really -- with 30 links. 

05 Mar, 2009

Two items on Bathrooms recently caught my eye:

1. a 2/27 op-ed piece in The New York Times (yes, that paper). Here's a link; I'm not sure it will work. Here are the first paragraphs:


2. Ike Casey, who is the executive director of a plumbing contractors' group (NAPHCC), once worked in the electrical industry. He once was the top staffer at the IEC, the non-union contractors association. I know and like him. I once gave him a hard time (in an e-mail) about the fact that he hardly ever blogs -- he's posted all of 7 items on the site since 2/07.

But the latest was worth the wait, on waterless urinals. Ike's not making a joke here. And what he had to say was interesting to me, because I've been trying (in my mind) to figure out why you'd want one of these things. See his post here.  The first words of the post are priceless, and reminded me a bit of reading Mark Twain:

02 Mar, 2009

Here's what the major forward-leaning sources reported about January:

American Institute of Architects -- the "work on the boards" index hit an all-time low for the 2nd straight month. The ABI index was 33.3, which is far below "50" -- the dividing line between expansion and construction.


McGraw-Hill Construction -- the $ value of January construction starts was said to be down 3% (vs. where things were in December). That's seasonally adjusted. If you page down to the bottom, the UNadjusted table shows the $ value of total January construction starts to be DOWN 46%.


Reed Construction Data -- shows a 9% drop in the $ value of January construction starts in vs. January 2008, with residential down another 36.7% and non-residential down 2.9%.

02 Mar, 2009

One of the things that annoys me about economists is the tendency to report things SAAR -- at a "seasonally adjusted annual rate." In other words:

a. There are real numbers (for housing starts in the month of January, for example).

b. What's reported, however, is the January starts at an annualized basis (SAAR).

c. You can't know anything about the adjustments. That's in footnotes somewhere. Are they accurate? How often are they changed? Do the seasonal adjustments reflect what goes on during a Depression? NO ONE KNOWS.

d. Finally, people get confused. The other day I saw a Bloomberg TV broadcaster report that U.S. GDP fell 6% in Q4. That's not what happened. U.S. GDP fell 1.5% or thereabouts in Q4, according to the most recent estimate. ANNUALIZED, it fell at a 6% rate. It would take longer to read the footnotes, adjustments, and such that go with this number than to just fling the number out itself.

[For example, the first estimate of Q4 GDP had it down 3.8%, SAAR. And: There is one more "final" estimate to come, in about a month]

- - - - -

OK, having spilled all of that officious bile, here's my point today: I keep hearing and reading that housing starts are DOWN to a certain number. But that doesn't tell me anything. Construction started on X number of REAL (not seasonally adjusted) houses in the U.S. in January.

How many?

Here's the answer, with some historical perspective:


Bottom line: single-family housing construction starts in January 2009 was 19.2% of what it was in January, 2005.

02 Mar, 2009

It didn't work in Toledo, Ohio. The Blade (local newspaper) has a story, accompanied by some video, on the brouhaha. 

02 Mar, 2009

Lots of people will tell you that they've not used their high-school math -- ever -- and that it was a waste of time. NONE of them are electricians. See this article (from IAEI's magazine -- that's the electrical inspector's group) titled, quite simply, "PV Math."

It's about "new systems voltage calculations that may be required by the [National Electrical] Code specific to PV [photovoltaic] systems."