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When you receive a letter from your insurance company telling you to have your home inspected, you frequently get met with a requirement (by the insurance company) to update your electrical wiring or electric panel in your home. You’ll read the words like ‘single strand aluminum’ or ‘open grounds’ or ‘no GFCI protection’ or ‘open splices’ or even ‘cloth wiring’. These are the items that Central Florida Electrician frequently remediates or repairs for our customers. We work with home buyers and sellers to repair these issues and provide a letter of satisfaction with our license number that quickly satisfies your insurance carrier.
Central Florida Electrician can review your 4 point home inspection or report from the home inspector and provide a quote for the repairs right away. Our staff of electricians are up to date on code requirements as well as the common items that insurance companies frequently call out. Our attention to detail makes us a reliable source of remediation when it comes to home inspection repairs.
Home Inspectors are not the enemy. They are hired by you, as a home owner, to satisfy the home insurance provider when they question the age and condition of your home as it relates to insurability. They are also hired, by you, when you’re the buyer of a new home. We work side by side with home inspectors constantly keeping communications open to avoid unnecessary red flags on items that are code compliant.
Frequently your insurance company will say things like, “your panel is outdated and needs to be replaced” This typically applies when you have a Federal Pacific panel, FPE panel, Challenger panel or a Zinsco panel. As far as the National Electrical Code is concerned, your panel is code compliant at time of installation and not in need of modification. The insurance company, however, has identified some panels are sources for failure and possible house fires. Their responsibility is to their shareholders and therefore they are mitigating risk by putting the replacement responsibility on you, the home owner.
Insurance companies also call out things like single strand aluminum wiring which requires us to either re-wire the entire home or use UL listed pigtail wirenuts to connect your devices to copper.
Insurance companies can also call out things from the home inspection like double tap conductors which means you have two wires under a terminal that is only listed for one wire.
Aluminum wiring can be an issue for insurance companies when it’s single strand aluminum from the 60’s and 70’s. This particular type of conductor is subject to expansion characteristics that are prone to failures at devices, especially under loads like space heaters or appliances.
Central Florida Electrician makes these repairs for our customers quickly and with fair pricing.
There are many variables, however; a good rule of thumb is approximately $15 per square foot including drywall repair.
This is a job that requires a lot of time as well as expensive UL listed materials. Typically it’s about 30-40% of the cost to re-wire an entire home.
FPE, Federal Pacific, Zinsco, Challenger and Stab-Loc are all key words to look for when determining if your panel is on the list of insurance companies to replace. Interior panels start at around $2,500 but can be much more if we have to add Arc Fault breakers. Exterior panels start at $3,500 and can be much more expensive when combining multiple panels or double taps.
This is your insurance company. Your home, if permitted originally, was installed per that years code and is therefore code compliant at time of installation. The insurance company doesn’t want to pay for loss, they want to mitigate their risk and preserve profits for their shareholders. They are the ones creating the necessity of re-wiring or panel replacement in your home.