I am planning on calling an electrician before we move in. I was just wondering about some ballpark estimates to rewire a home with aluminum wiring (appx. 1900 sq feet).
Sarah: I can't answer your question, but I plead with you and your husband to not purchase a house with that wiring if you value your life. In my locale there have been so many homes that have burned down causing loss of life as a result of aluminum wiring. Unless you COMPLETELY exchange all the wiring for copper wire, you will never FEEL SAFE. Rely on history. It is far greater to be SAFE NOW than to be SORRY LATER. NO house is worth that RISK!
Several thousand dollars. Copper is near all-time highs right now, and labour is going to run you a lot as well. I would seriously consider buying another house if the aluminum wiring causes you that much concern.
You may want to check with your insurance company, because my mom's house was wired up with alumimum wiring and now the house is about 30 years old and the insurance company is threating to drop the insurance if we don't replace the wiring with copper because alumimum will not take heavy electrical loads and when they do they heat up quickly and start fires. If you haven't bought the house i would put a clause into the buyer's agreement or ask for some money off because alumimum wires are infeior and garbage. For my mom's house it ended up costing us about 4000 bucks for the electrictian to pull out all the wires, we did the demo ourselves which was to pull all the drywall off and clean-up leaving all interior walls bare. and the rest of the 4000 was for the drywallers to come in and put new drywall up. But since our house also had old pipes too so we decieded to replace those too as well. What you may be looking at is a money pit, after all wiring, plumbing and other repairs were done, it ended up costing us about 12 grand to do all the work and half of it was because we did the work ourselves
