Whole-house rewiring in Los Angeles
Whole-house rewiring in an older Los Angeles house happens in stages, and you keep living there while it runs. Before anything starts we tell you what goes first and which walls get opened, so you know what the place looks like in between.
Coming out to look is free. Your price the same day you ask.
What decides this job
- Which walls get opened, which the cable route decides
- One story or two: a two-story house takes more wall
- What turns up once a wall is open
- Which utility and which permit desk your address is on. Look up your address
A rewire happens in stages
Nobody rewires a house in a day and nobody moves out for one either. The work runs in stages: the service and the panel, then the circuits that carry the most load, then the rest of the house, with the place habitable between each one.
Before any of it starts you get the order in writing: which rooms go first and what is live while each stage runs. It also says where the work stops for the day.
Which walls get opened
Getting new cable into a finished house means openings, and where they go is decided by where the cable can run, and that is not always where you would want them. Attics and crawl spaces take most of it in a single-story house. A two-story house takes more wall.
Getting the cable in is our work. Making the wall look the way it did before is plastering and painting, and that is a separate bill unless your quote says otherwise.
Knob-and-tube, and what makes it a problem
Knob-and-tube is not automatically unsafe. It was installed to the standard of its day and plenty of it is still intact. It turns into a problem when insulation gets packed over conductors that were designed to shed heat into open air, or when decades of splices are added by people who were not electricians. Some insurers also refuse to write a policy on a house that still has it.
So the usual questions are whether it can carry what you are about to plug into it and whether you can insure the house. Whether it is dangerous today is rarely one of them.
Many Craftsman houses in Pasadena and 1920s bungalows in Hollywood still have it. Our Pasadena and Hollywood pages cover the wiring in those houses.
Cloth-covered conductors, which are not the same thing
Houses from the thirties to the fifties usually have rubber and cloth insulated conductors in metal or early non-metallic cable. The copper is fine. The insulation is brittle and it fails where it has been handled, which is at the boxes.
That is why a rewire in one of these houses sometimes starts as a job to add a circuit.
Say what is happening and we will tell you what it involves.
One sentence about what is happening will do. Sending it costs nothing and does not book a visit.