Older homes in south Florida may have classic looks, but renovating them will almost always include replacing old wiring and fuse boxes. The amount of renovation needed depends on safety and building code requirements. Depending on whether you’re replacing a fuse box or rewiring an entire guest house, your electrical contractor costs can vary widely. A wide variety of factors affect your final costs, depending on how much you can do yourself, and how complicated the final project becomes.
Do it Yourself
If you’ve successfully completed other home projects, you may feel as if you can do a home rewiring project, saving money for other parts of the renovation. If your only upgrade is to add a ceiling fan or to replace a switch plate, that may be true, but getting a professional is best for anything more elaborate than that. The safety considerations alone are enough to steer you in this direction, but the cost of fixing mistakes made through inexperience can be higher than the original price of the job done right.
Supplies
The cost of your job will depend partly on what supplies you’ll need to finish the job. These can include:
- Filing and pulling a permit to wire your home
- Wiring, outlet covers, switches, and breaker box
- Conduit
- Supplies for repairing walls if needed for access to old wiring
Building Permits
While the cost of a building permit for wiring your renovation job will be the same whether a professional electrician pays for it or you do, a commercial electrical contractor knows exactly what kind of permits are needed and how the local permit process works. He knows exactly what information and paperwork will be needed in order to receive a permit, and which permits you’ll need to get in order to make your project legal and up to code in your neighborhood.
Electrical Panels
If you have one of the classic Art Deco older homes in south Florida, and it hasn’t had its electrical wiring updated in the last few decades, you may be living in a house with an old-fashioned fuse box. Not only is this expensive, it can also be unsafe to use. It’s definitely a sign that the wiring may need replacing. Fuse boxes should always be replaced with modern circuit breakers, which can handle today’s electrical demand much better than its older cousin. Putting in a new circuit breaker will definitely factor in electrical contractor costs, but it can pay for itself in safety features and possible home insurance premiums.
Estimating and Lowering Materials Costs
While you can’t know the final total for renovation and rewiring costs until the job is done, it’s possible to estimate the costs and make an effort to reduce them during the work process. New outlets and switches will have to be installed when a room is rewired, but if you can reuse your old outlet covers and switch plates you’ll save some money on those supplies. If your ceiling fan is still in good condition, your electrical contractor will be able to install it back in place once the wiring is finished without any additional cost for a new fan.
Replacing any outlets or switches can cost between $70 and $120 per item, depending on where the items are placed and whether other wiring has to take place in order to do a successful job. The copper wire itself can be one of the most expensive elements in a renovation project. It can run over $1,000 for a small bungalow-type house, and over $3,000 for larger, multi-bedroom family homes.
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