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May 15, 2002: The Electric Upgrade I admit that I had more than a few second thoughts when I discovered that the house still had much of the original knob & tube wiring. (For those not familiar with the term, see below) But I did some homework, and being that I am not a family of six, with heavy demands on the power supply, decided that I could work around it until the funds were available to upgrade the service and re-wire the house. The visible insulation was, for the most part, still serviceable, but I knew that electric would be one of the large projects that would have to be tackled early on. |
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The trick was finding homeowner's insurance. I was lucky enough to get a reasonable quote from the agent who had covered this house for the POs (no walk-through inspection required). There was an electric upgrade done in 1963 (the same year as The Great Paneling Project), and newer wiring was installed in part of the kitchen, the main bathroom, and a couple of random lines were run to support window AC units. Somehow though, the POs managed to do the upgrade without properly grounding anything. Immediately after moving in, I had my electrician run 2 new circuits so that I could run all my office equipment. This maxed out the space in the existing 100 amp panel, forcing me to move on the service upgrade sooner rather than later - probably not a bad thing... When I first looked at the house, the panel(s) in the basement was enough to give my real estate agent a heart attack - she went to some pretty great lengths to avoid showing me this one because "...it has issues". |
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 While I'd love to rewire the whole house and just be done with it, I'm not ready to break plaster in every room just yet. This phase of the job will upgrade the service to 200 amp (one of these days I am going to put in central air) and rewire most of the first floor, including adding ceiling fans in the living room and sunroom and adding several additional outlets to rooms that were designed in 1920 when the house was lit with gas. The Before and After Page is here |
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This page last updated on March 21, 2004. © 2004 PGE, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. |
