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Q. Our house was built in 1966 with electric baseboard heat, forced central air and has a 200 amp electric panel in the basement. The wiring is all copper and we have been told by inspectors that the electrical contractor did a good neat job. The house is approximately 1600 square feet of living space, all on one floor. Considering the age of the house and the rising cost of electricity would replacing the old wiring be a good idea and what would be the approximate cost to do it?
A. Your home was built to be the most modern thing on the block back in the day when electricity was cheap. The copper wiring and methods used at your house were “state of the art” and that being said I am confident that the wiring behind your walls is still in good shape. It’s second generation Romex® flexible cable and was inspected by an electrical inspector when it went in. I’m sure the electrician doing the job took pride in his work and that made the job better. With a 200 amps to the house, you have the size service that is still being put in houses the size of yours even to this day.
If you want to confirm what is going on you can have the face of the panel box-- called the deadfront-- taken off and all of the connections examined. What would be searched for would be signs of overheating at the connections, water damage or anything that may have been done since installation that is out of the ordinary. Notice I didn’t say “not to code”. The electrical code is updated every three years and the code that your house was built under was pre-1966. Many safety innovations have been incorporated into the code since your house was built such as hard-wired smoke detectors, ground-fault circuit interrupters (GFCIs) for prescribed locations and arc-fault interrupters and I’d recommend considering upgrading to them. What can go wrong with the wiring in your house can go wrong in a house of any age-- even new. Things like a wiring cable getting damaged by a mis-driven nail or screw by someone mounting something to a wall or ceiling after the house is complete. Rodents-- including squirrels-- getting into an attic, crawl space, wall or basement and dining on the wire insulation can shock the critter to death and start a fire in the process. That happens from time to time. A loose connection from a sloppily installed switch, plug, light, fan or any other device attached to the wiring system can heat up because it’s loose, creating resistance to current flow. Outlets get worn out due to numerous repeated usages-- such as the upper outlet of a duplex wall outlet in a carpeted hallway or room where the vacuum cleaner gets plugged into time and time again and the outlet becomes loose-- again, causing resistance. Unless a wire gets physically damaged or overloaded it just doesn’t wear out because it’s old. Insulation can get brittle over time but even if it’s brittle it will be fine if left undisturbed. It’s the points of connection where you can have trouble but if something is installed and connected properly there should be no problem. Older wiring is often insufficient for today’s loads. We who have lived in older homes know that using the coffee maker and microwave at same time will send us to the basement to replace a blown fuse. To avoid that some folks will replace a blown fuse with one of higher amperage-- too high for that particular circuit’s wire gauge and that’s how fires get started and why fuses were abandoned in favor of breakers. There is some merit to the argument that after a period of unspecified length even circuit breakers can become unreliable due to age. They are mechanical devices that are designed to open a circuit in response to heat-- too much current draw on the device will heat it up to a point at which a bi-metal device trips and opens the circuit. Some have been known not to do that. Certain brands of circuit breakers have a better reputation than others. Electricians know the good from the bad. I inspected a 25 year old house that had two electrical panel boxes. The room I was standing in had overhead lights. I switched one box off and the lights stayed on. I switched the second box off and the lights still stayed on. Obviously there was a failure the likes of which would only show up should the current draw to the box exceed the box’s capacity and the main breaker would not switch open. The person determining that would be a fire investigator. The next time I went back to that house there were two new panels. If there are any weak points in this electrical system I’d start looking at the breakers. It might be prudent to call a licensed electrician to go over the box and render an opinion. It’s not very expensive to replace breakers one by one. The cost of replacing the whole distribution panel the size of yours and not increasing the service size-- because you don’t need to-- is in the $800 to $1000. range.