The meter is on the corner of my house and has a 90 A breaker out there. I just looked and that panel is FPE too. The input cable I was talking about runs from there to the main CB panel that is in my garage, through a conduit under the living room slab. So I think that cable is mine, not the utility company's.
90 A service isn't much for a modern home with all of our "stuff". I never thought about what kind of cable is feeding up to the house. Maybe I should. The aluminum cable I was talking about is from the 90 A breakered input to the main panel. If I read the printing on the cable right, it is 4 ga aluminum.
All the wiring inside the house, that leaves the main panel is copper, so I don't have to worry about that.
Good to know that I should consider replacing the whole panel for better quality stuff. Glad I don't have plastic plumbing too.
If you find a house that has aluminum romex to the branch circuit outlets and lights, the only safe solution is to call a specially trained electrician and have all the outlets pigtailed. They use special compression connectors and tooling that Tyco/AMP only leases, never sells. I don't do it, and considering the numbers I heard thrown around for training ($800) and monthly tool lease (lots), I don't want to. (And I bet that you'd need a special liability insurance for doing it, too, in case you screw up.) You'd have to have a crew doing nothing but aluminum pigtailing all day, every day to make it pay.
Or rip it all out and rewire with copper. ($$$) Tightening the screws on the devices is NOT going to do it - the whole problem is expansion and cold flow, and the connections self-loosen and start arcing and overheating, creating a vicious cycle.
Myself, I vote for the rip-out all the AL wire and rewire with CU. It's the only way to be sure you've got it all.
Up here in Ontario Canad, MOST houses had fused panels well up into the early seventies - and some later. Mine has a 200 amp fused panel - can't remember how many circuits - but it has "pull-outs" with 2 fuses each - come of which have latched"doors" on them so you have to pull them to change fuses. These are for "split" circuits or 220 circuits. Also has 4 "cartridge" pullouts for things like stove, drier, AC, etc.
One advantage to fuses is there are no "nuisance trips". And they are readilly available anywhere.
Or simply replace ALL outlets and switches with CoAlr rated devices. Except for the VERY early production aluminum wiring (which will break if you so much as look at it crosswise) the wiring itself is NOT a problem - only the terminations. The earlier CuAl rated devices should NEVER have been approved - and a "push-in" type device is NEVER to be trusted on non-copper conductors. My house is 32 years old now, wired with aluminum (second generation) and has not had a sigle connection problem to date. I have had a few outlets basically wear out - to the point plugs don't want to stay in, and they then tend to arc and warm up internally - so I've started replacing all with CoAlr devices. Significantly cheaper for each device than the special wire nuts required to "pig tail" all the wiring with copper, and with the advantage you are not adding another pair of connections to go bad at each device. The insurance companies are requiring inspection of all aluminum wired homes before new coverage is issued - and are reccomending the "pig-tail" route. The CoAlr devices are not generally stocked by the "home center" or hardware stores, but are stocked by the better electrical supply outlets. In my case I bought them in "case lots" of
10 each, at a cost equivalent to just less than 1.5 wire nuts per device. My dad, a retired electrician, cringes at the pigtails because the boxes are generally too full when finished to be safe, in his judgement. The aluminum wiring generally has to be bent to too short a radius to tuck all the wires and the device into the box.
Rewiring my 2 story 1300 sq foot(more or less) home with copper would run several thousand dollars (possibly as high as 10) - and the original cost to wire it when new was under $800 complete with panel and all lighting fixtures!! Replacing all devices will total significantly less than $100 and a few hours of my time.
snipped-for-privacy@sny.der.on.ca wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Interesting. I work for an electrical supply/contractor shop. We were quoted around $4 for aluminum rated receptacles by our wholesaler. Marr #63 copper to aluminum rated wire nuts are only around 40 cents each.
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Insurance companies are being a real pain lately WRT wiring. The latest thing is not insuring houses with less than 100A services. Apparently your house is more likely to catch fire if you have a 60A service. It could be a completely modern, still in production 60A breaker panel retrofit a few years ago to get rid of the ancient 4ct fuse panel in your
60 year old house or a tiny house built just a couple years ago but now you can't get insurance. Pfft.
For houses with aluminum wire they have been asking for an "inspection" but it takes us quite a while to pull out of them exactly what they want inspected. Do we pull apart every single box to see that the devies are CoAlr rated? Do we check a random sample? A random sample has been acceptable to most. That seems silly. One retrofit Cu only receptacle somewhere in the house that you don't catch could still overheat and burn the place down. But it was inspected...
Usually there is already a splice in the box, unless they've used the two screws on receptacles to feed through to the rest of a circuit. You can just remove the existing wire nut and restrip and replace with a copper pigtail, Marr 63 nut and a reguar Cu device. Box fill should be fine unless it's a tiny box. They don't allow us to feed through receptacles anymore, pigtails are required if the circuit continues on so we're stuck with using them - might as well be copper.
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