A full rewire is the largest electrical job a house will ever have, and in a Pittsburgh house it is as much a carpentry and plaster problem as an electrical one. The Electric Guys plan and carry out whole-house rewires across the city and about thirty-three miles around it, with the route planning done before the first hole rather than improvised once the ceiling is open.
Most houses that genuinely need one share a profile: original knob-and-tube or early cloth-covered cable, an undersized service, ungrounded two-prong receptacles throughout, and decades of additions spliced into circuits that were never designed for them. Not every old house is in that position. Establishing which you have is the first job, and it is free.
Why choose The Electric Guys
- Route planning first. Where the cable can run decides how much plaster comes down, and that decides most of the cost and nearly all of the disruption. We work that out in advance.
- A real order of operations. Kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms carry the highest risk and the most load. Where a house is being done in stages, that is where it starts.
- One service, properly sized. A rewire is the moment to size the service for what the house will need in ten years, not what it needed in 1950 — including a charger and air conditioning if either is on the horizon.
- Permit and inspection built in. Rewires are inspected in every municipality we work in, in stages, and that scheduling is ours to manage.
Our whole-home rewiring process
- Survey the house. Existing wiring type and condition, service size, panel, grounding, and what has already been replaced.
- Agree the scope. Full rewire, or a staged plan with dates and a fixed price for each stage.
- Plan the routes. Attic, basement, closets, chases and stud bays — every metre of cable that runs through an existing void is a metre of plaster that stays intact.
- Rough in. New circuits, new boxes, grounded throughout, with the rough inspection before anything is closed.
- Panel and service. New panel, correctly sized service, everything labelled.
- Trim and final. Devices, plates, fixtures, final inspection, and a circuit schedule that matches reality.
What a rewire means in this housing stock
Plaster and lath is the defining constraint. It does not cut like drywall and it does not patch like drywall, so the number that matters in a rewire quote is not really the wire — it is how many openings the route requires. A good plan through attic and basement voids can rewire a whole floor with a handful of small openings. A bad one takes the ceilings down.
Balloon framing helps. In much of the pre-1930 housing here, the stud bays run uninterrupted from the sill to the top plate, which means a cable can often be dropped the full height of a wall in one go. Platform-framed houses from the fifties onwards have a plate at every floor and need more openings, which is why a 1955 Bethel Park ranch is not automatically cheaper to rewire than a 1915 city house.
The other local reality is basements. A large proportion of the homes we rewire have basements that have taken water at some point, and that changes where the panel goes, how the circuits are protected and what gets mounted low on a wall. It is worth solving properly while the walls are open, because it will not be this easy again.
Serving Pittsburgh, PA and nearby
Most rewires are in the older city neighbourhoods and the pre-war pockets beyond them — Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, the South Side, Highland Park, Beechview, the older streets of Mt. Lebanon and Penn Hills, and the village cores out in Murrysville. We also work through Bethel Park, Monroeville, Robinson, Moon Township, McCandless and Cranberry, where the job is more often partial: a kitchen, an addition, or the circuits an inspection flagged.
Estimates on a rewire are free and take about an hour on site, Monday through Saturday. Call or text (412) 501-7391.