If your house was built before about 1950 and has never been fully rewired, it's a genuine possibility — and Encino has a lot of housing from that period, particularly south of Ventura Boulevard. The usual giveaways are two-prong ungrounded outlets throughout, white ceramic knobs and tubes visible on the joists in the attic, and cloth-covered cable at the panel. Partial updates are common too, so a house can have modern wiring in the kitchen and original knob-and-tube in the bedrooms. We confirm it with an attic and box inspection rather than guessing from the build year.

Knob-and-tube that's intact, undisturbed and not overloaded isn't inherently unsafe, and it's still legal in existing installations in most jurisdictions. The danger comes from what has usually happened to it over eighty or ninety years. The rubber and cloth insulation becomes brittle and falls away. There's no equipment grounding conductor, so nothing with a three-prong plug is properly protected. Previous owners have spliced modern circuits into it, often outside a junction box. And in many homes it has been buried under blown-in attic insulation, which it was never designed to sit in because it relies on open air to shed heat. It's that combination — not the age — that makes it a replacement job.

Many carriers won't write or renew a policy on a home with active knob-and-tube, and others will only do so at a higher premium or on condition that it be replaced within a set period. Policies vary by carrier, so the answer depends on yours — but knob-and-tube is one of the most common reasons an older home fails an insurance inspection. A permitted rewire with a signed-off LADBS inspection gives you documentation the carrier can accept. Check the specific requirement with your insurer before commissioning work, because some accept a partial remediation and others don't.

Rewiring is priced by scope, not by a flat figure. Square footage, circuit count, single versus two storey, attic and crawlspace access, and lath-and-plaster versus drywall all change the number — and older Encino homes with plaster walls generally need more access points and more patching than newer construction. Whether the panel also has to be upgraded is often the other half of the cost. Not every property needs a full rewire either. We assess on site and give you a written scope and price, and that visit is free.

An ungrounded outlet is a two-prong receptacle on a circuit with no equipment grounding conductor — standard in homes wired before the mid-1960s. Without a ground there's no safe path for fault current, surge protectors won't work as intended, and anything with a three-prong plug isn't protected the way its manufacturer assumed. Replacing a two-prong outlet with a three-prong one and nothing else is the wrong fix, because it looks grounded and isn't. The correct options are running a proper grounding conductor, or protecting the circuit with a GFCI and labelling the outlets as ungrounded where code permits it. We'll tell you which applies to each run.

Yes. Replacing branch circuit wiring is permitted electrical work, and because Encino is part of the City of Los Angeles the permit goes through the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety rather than a local city hall. If the job also involves a service upgrade, LADWP schedules the disconnect and reconnect. Unpermitted rewiring is one of the issues that most reliably surfaces during a home sale — and it's also the documentation an insurer will ask for. We file the permit and see the job through final inspection.

More disruptive than rewiring a drywall house, and it's worth knowing that upfront. Lath and plaster doesn't take a clean cut-and-patch the way drywall does, so access points need more care going in and a plasterer rather than a drywall patch coming out. Where there's good attic or crawlspace access we fish most runs through existing cavities and keep the openings to boxes and turns. Two-storey plaster homes need the most. We walk the property and show you where every access point will be before any work starts, so the patching scope is agreed rather than discovered.

We rewire throughout Encino (91316 and 91436), with most of the work in the older housing south of Ventura Boulevard — Amestoy Estates, Royal Oaks, Encino Village and Rancho Estates — plus the Encino Hills. We also serve neighbouring Tarzana, Sherman Oaks, Reseda and Woodland Hills, where we're based. Coverage is subject to scheduling and scope of work.