Curious!! How much does this sort of thing cost? I doubt I'll be living where I do for too long (though I hope I can), but if I do, I wanna know the overall cost of modernizing electricals.

Hi! So sorry for the delay!

Ours ended up costing a whopping $25,000. BUT... I'll be fair and say that my house is a 1950s house that was heavily renovated in 1962. So, half the wiring was badly out of date and causing fires in the ceilings. AND we opted to have some things added. Like outdoor electrical outlets. They didn't have electric power tools in the 1960s so it didn't occur to them to have outdoor outlets. And we also didn't have a lot of good outlets. Every single outlet was ungrounded and no room was up to code with the amount of outlets we had in each room. So we opted to do quads in some areas to keep up with the demands technology has. In addition to this, the external electrical wiring into the house was BADLY out of code and damaged. So the entire lead into the house had to be done and we had to add outlets to some walls (run wire) in a house that has a rather inaccessible underside. Both the breaker boxes were woefully damaged and out of code, causing them to not trip when they should be tripping hence all the wall fires.

So, I'll say that this is one of the worst-case scenarios and it wasn't just about modernizing the house. It was also a matter of safety, life or death, and making sure the wiring is able to keep up with the electrical demands that modern powersupplies have. We couldn't actually ground the house so all the outlets are GFCI outlets that self-trip.

My research stated that at the time you could expect, for a total re-wire, to be $20,000 - $35,000 USD depending on square footage of the house. Mine is 2100 sqft so it's also a larger house and so you can expect to pay more. Thankfully all that is behind us and I no longer have to check for wall fires.

Again, so so so sorry for the delay responding!

oof, yeah thats about what I expected, ouch... Our house is very much the same, built in the 60s and it has what is now considered "heavily illegal water pipe and electrical layouts". Thanks much for alot of this!

No problem! Sounds like you’re in a similar boat. Our drainage pipes are also gonna need some serious relaxed t and work eventually too. But they’re not quite as bad.

Yeah, to give clarification. My uncle had to fix a small leak in one of the normal pipes because it was literally 4 inches in front of and 1 foot above the circuit box. But the pipe was directly next to (as in 2 inches away from) the hot water pipe (small and pressurized). His cutter slipped, nicked the hot water pipe, and scalded him from head to hips WHILE ALSO GUSHING ALL OVER THE CIRCUIT BOX. It was a MIRACLE it didn't short, break, or damage any electrics at all. The box was 100% unaffected (its a metal box with a broken latch and no seal on the door so it was not water tight). This is HEAVILY illegal design now and insurance will not cover that sort of change.

I was also streaming my vtuber anniversary stream while that happened. Not a fun night lmao.

Yeeeesh, that's kinda how our rewire started. We had someone to come fix the bathroom and he wired up a new fan to keep it from getting moldy again. And the guy was like "oh... wow, so I tried to link it into the light fixture and all this insulation is full of singe marks and evidence of repeated fires. You should... uhhh, have that looked at." And I'm like "oh wonderful, decades worth unknown electrical fires in an ungrounded house that is woefully not up to code and insurance is definitely not gonna cover it."

What really threw me for a loop was that on the deed and everything the house is listed as 1962 but that's impossible since I had a carpenter tell me the frame is 1950s for sure. But I couldn't be sure until the electrician came in and pointed out all the 1950s silver insulated wiring. So that's all but proven it. They must have done enough renovations to have it called a 1962 house... wild situation.

I do honestly hope that you can get your house fixed up. It can be really unsettling knowing that some of these things are going on and you can't do anything about it. For months I was feeling the walls for heat.

Christ that is insane...

Sadly I doubt it'll ever happen while I live here. Insurance will never cover that, we barely make the 10k a year or so to still live in it, and my grandmother, whose name the house is in currently, is approaching 80. Any one accident is enough to have us homeless. The house is a duplex and its on a reverse mortgage so sadly there's nothing we can do.

My grandparents are/were notoriously horrible with money use (one is passed, hence the "were").

Awww dang, I'm so sorry to hear that. That is such a wretched situation to be in. My heart goes out to you because the only reason I had money to fix my house is that my grandmother died and left me some money and I used that to make sure I didn't burn to death in my sleep. Well, technically it wasn't even left to me. My mom helped me out. For which I'm eternally grateful. But it was just a stroke of luck. When I bought the house it was SUPER cheap so... it shouldn't be a surprise to me that there's a lot of repair needs.