I did not dabble in LN before but I am running a fully synced Bitcoin node. Do I qualify for the 30 merits if I use Electrum wallet for opening lightening channels?
Where are our node runners? Guys, come and run some nodes. You can even get some free merits for doing so. 
You'll get 10 merits if you open a lightning channel. Since you're running Electrum, you can open up to three of them and get 10 merits for each one. More channels = better.
Besides, Electrum is known to have payment routing issues with only one channel, as I saw for myself some time ago. So better to open more than one channel.