September 2026
Opening a wall is how most people find out
Nobody calls me about their old wiring. They call me about a kitchen. Somewhere on the second day of demo a contractor pulls down lath and finds cloth insulation, or ceramic knobs, or a junction with four wires twisted together and taped, and the remodel stops while everybody stands around looking at it. That is the usual sequence, and it is worth knowing in advance what those finds actually mean, because the range runs from “note it and move on” to “this changes the scope.”
Around the White Mountains the wiring story is rarely one era. A cabin gets built, then a bedroom gets added in the eighties, then someone finishes the basement, then a shop goes up. You can often read the whole history of a house by walking the crawl space and looking at what kind of cable is where. That layering is the defining feature of the work up here, and it is also why a whole-house judgment from a photo of one junction box is not a real judgment.
What you might actually find
Knob and tube
The oldest thing still in service. Individual conductors running through ceramic tubes where they pass through framing and supported on ceramic knobs, with the hot and the neutral run separately rather than in a cable. It was installed well into the middle of the last century and some of it is, physically, in fine shape.
The problems with it are not really about the copper. It has no equipment grounding conductor, so every outlet on it is a two-prong outlet with nothing to ground to. It was designed to shed heat into open air, which means burying it in blown-in insulation, which is exactly what happened to a lot of it during every insulation push of the last fifty years, is a real concern. And it has almost always been modified, because a system with no ground and limited capacity gets spliced into by somebody every couple of decades. The original work is frequently better than what was added to it.
Cloth-covered cable with no ground
More common than true knob and tube. Early cable assemblies with rubber or cloth insulation and either no ground wire or a reduced-size one. The rubber becomes brittle with age and heat, and the place it fails first is at the terminations inside boxes and fixtures, because that is where the heat is. You can often find a run that is perfectly sound in the middle and crumbling at both ends.
Aluminum branch wiring
A specific era of houses have aluminum wire in the branch circuits, rather than only in the service feeders where it is entirely normal. The issue is the connections. Aluminum expands, contracts and creeps under a screw differently than copper does, and connections loosen over time and heat. It is not a rip-it-all-out situation. It is a situation where every termination in the house needs to be dealt with using a listed repair method, and where you do not want anybody doing casual DIY at the outlets.
Ungrounded three-prong outlets
The most common find of all, and it is somebody’s old home improvement rather than an era. A two-prong outlet was swapped for a three-prong one on a circuit that has no ground. It looks modern, it accepts a grounded plug, and the ground pin goes nowhere. Surge protectors plugged into these do essentially nothing. A three-light tester finds these in a few minutes.
What it means for your project
Here is the part that actually decides your budget and schedule. Old wiring in a wall you are not opening is generally allowed to stay as it is. Old wiring in the area you are remodeling is a different matter, because once you are altering a space, the work you do there has to meet current code.
Practically, that tends to mean the circuits serving the remodeled area get replaced back to the panel, the new work gets grounded circuits and the required GFCI and AFCI protection, and boxes get made accessible. Kitchens and bathrooms have specific requirements that older wiring essentially never meets, which is why kitchen remodels in old cabins almost always involve more electrical than anybody planned for.
The boundary question, where the new work stops and the old system continues, is the one worth discussing early. Sometimes the line falls in a natural place. Sometimes the only sane answer is to take a whole floor or a whole house because chasing individual circuits through a layered cabin costs more than doing it cleanly.
Doing it in pieces
A full rewire is a large job and not everybody is in a position to do it at once. It can be staged, and there is a sensible order to the stages.
- The panel and service first, if it needs it. Everything else lands there, so doing branch work before the panel means touching some of it twice.
- Kitchen and bathrooms next, because that is where the water, the load and the code requirements concentrate.
- Bedrooms, where AFCI protection matters and where the circuits are usually simple runs.
- Whatever is left, as walls open for other reasons. A staged rewire that rides along with other remodeling is much cheaper than one that opens walls purely for wire.
If you are doing this in stages over years, keep a record of what has been done and when. In a house that has already been wired a room at a time over four decades, the most valuable thing you can leave the next owner, or your future self, is a note about which circuits are new.
Insurance and selling
Two practical reasons this comes up outside of remodels. Some insurance carriers ask about knob and tube or aluminum branch wiring on older homes, and a few will price a policy differently or decline over it. If you are buying a cabin up here, that is a question worth asking your carrier before you close rather than after.
The other is the home inspection. An inspector will flag ungrounded three-prong outlets, an obsolete panel brand and visible old wiring, and those findings land on the negotiating table. If you are the seller, knowing what is in the walls before a buyer’s inspector tells you is a much better position to be in. In either case what you want is somebody who will actually look and give you a written account of what is there, not a blanket recommendation to rewire the house.
What is safe to live with in the meantime
Not everything old is an emergency, and I would rather be straight about that than scare you into a rewire you do not need this year. A sound knob and tube circuit that is not buried in insulation, has not been hacked into, and is feeding a couple of light fixtures is not the thing that keeps me up at night.
The things I would not wait on: anything warm, anything that smells, any scorching at a box or a device, a breaker that trips repeatedly on an old circuit, old wiring buried in blown insulation, and ungrounded outlets in wet locations. Those last ones can often be made considerably safer on an interim basis with GFCI protection and the correct labeling, which is a real and code-recognized approach for ungrounded circuits while you plan the larger work.
Before you demo
If you are planning a remodel in an older place, the cheapest hour you will spend is having an electrician look at the panel and the accessible wiring before the contractor starts. You find out what is there, what the remodel will trigger, and roughly what it runs, at a point where you can still adjust the plan. Finding out on day three of demo, with a crew standing around, is the expensive version of the same information.
Apex Electrical Services holds Arizona licenses C-11 #192532 and R-11 #192533 and works Pinetop-Lakeside and about forty miles out. If you are buying an older place, planning a remodel, or just want to know what is behind your walls, call (928) 358-2546 or get in touch through the contact page.