Circuit 11 · 15A · Rewiring
Rewiring older homes and apartments
The valley has beautiful old housing stock, and a lot of it is still running on wiring that predates the appliances plugged into it.
Act 02 — The Detail
Monfett Electric rewires older homes and apartment units across western Massachusetts, including knob and tube removal, replacing ungrounded two prong circuits, and unit by unit rewires for landlords and property owners.
Knob and tube
Knob and tube is not automatically dangerous, and plenty of it has run quietly for eighty years. What makes it a problem is everything that happened around it: insulation blown into cavities where the wiring relies on open air to shed heat, splices added by whoever owned the house in 1974, and no ground anywhere in the system. Most insurance carriers now price it as a defect, and some will not write a policy over it at all.
Two prong outlets
An ungrounded circuit is the reason a house has two prong outlets, and swapping in a three prong receptacle does not fix it, it just hides it. There are legitimate ways to handle this, including a GFCI at the head of the circuit with the correct labelling, and there is the real fix, which is running a new circuit. Which one makes sense depends on how many circuits are affected and what the walls are like.
Rewires for landlords
Apartment rewires are their own kind of job: the unit has to come back on the same day where possible, the work has to pass on the first inspection, and the tenant has to be dealt with like a person. We have done these unit by unit in Springfield and Chicopee multi families, and the schedule is usually the thing that matters most.
What we do
- Whole house rewires, staged room by room where people are living in it
- Knob and tube removal and replacement
- Grounding and bonding brought up to current code
- Apartment and unit rewires with subpanels
- Circuits added for kitchens, bathrooms and laundry that never had their own
Act 03 — The Answers
Undisturbed knob and tube in good condition is not automatically hazardous, and a great deal of it has run quietly for decades. The problems come from what gets done to it: blown in insulation packed around conductors that need open air to shed heat, decades of amateur splices, and the absence of any ground in the system. Most insurance carriers now treat it as a defect, and some will not write a policy over it.
Usually yes. Whole house rewires are normally staged room by room or floor by floor so that most of the house keeps power most of the time. It is dusty and disruptive work and there will be days without power in the area being worked on, but people live through it routinely. Apartment rewires are different and we aim to bring a unit back the same day.
Not on its own. A two prong outlet means the circuit has no ground, and fitting a three prong receptacle to it creates an outlet that looks protected and is not. The code does allow a GFCI at the head of the circuit with the downstream outlets labelled as having no equipment ground, which is a legitimate interim answer. The real fix is a new circuit, and which route makes sense depends on how many circuits are affected.