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Hi, it’s Mark from Top Local Lead Generation. We’re here today talking with David Fairbairn of Fairbairn Inspections in Vancouver and we’re going to cover a very interesting topic, aluminum wiring. How are you doing today David?
David: Hey, I’m good Mark. Are you ready to talk about electrical safety?
Mark: Yeah, so I guess we’re in a spot where we can actually see an electrical panel where you are today, so aluminum wiring, what year was aluminum wire sort of started to be installed in homes?
David: Just for today we’re actually looking at an electrical panel. This house was built in the mid 80’s. You’re not going to find aluminum wiring in a house built in the 80’s. Aluminum wiring was used from the mid 60’s to the mid, late 70’s and I’ve seen it as late as about 77, 78 and here’s a thing about it, because it was manufactured and installed around this time it doesn’t necessarily mean it stopped after the 70’s, I’ve actually seen back stock of it used in unpermitted work. Sometimes it’s an electrician whose got a bunch of extra in his truck and he’s going to throw it into your panel so that’s why you always have to check every single panel even if it’s from the mid 80’s, I always pull them open and once or twice I found old aluminum but the main thing it was used from the mid 60’s to mid 70’s.
Mark: So why are we even concerned about aluminum wiring?
David: Well we are concerned about aluminum wiring as it overheats so the draw with aluminum wiring was that it was cheap and it’s exactly as easy to install as copper was, you know, as copper prices rose we said hey you know, let’s actually start using aluminum, it’s a lot cheaper, you can wire a whole house for a lot less than you can with copper and what we discovered later unfortunately was it overheats at connections, so aluminum handles current very poorly and it tends to overheat at places like we’ve got a switch, a light fixture, a junction box, those are all areas that you can actually get an overheating condition and it actually started fires and the statistic was that a home wired with aluminum wiring is 44 times more likely to have an electrical fire than a house wired with copper so you can see the statistical need to remediate aluminum wiring and for that reason let’s say you’re buying a house, a Vancouver special built in the early 70’s you know, if you’ve got aluminum wiring you’re going to have a hard time getting insurance on that house. The insurance companies understandably don’t want to see aluminum wiring in the house and if they do see it, they want to see it corrected or the house rewired.
Mark: So how do you tell if you got it in your house?
David: O.K. so what we’re going do is I’m going to pull up some photos of it because I want to show you what aluminum wiring looks like in a house, so let me know when you can see the photo appear that I’m going to be bringing up.
Mark: o.k.
David: Okay, so here we are, we’re looking at a receptacle that’s been pulled from the wall and it’s pretty easy to tell that you’ve got aluminum. Copper is kind of a shiny gold colour and aluminum is generally a silver colour so if you see this chances are you have aluminum. Now in some older houses particularly in character homes pre 1950’s you will see what’s called tin copper where they would actually take the copper, put some solder on the end of it in what’s called tinning and that can actually confuse a lot of newer inspectors and newer electrician where it actually looks like aluminum. The way to tell is that if you have a rubber jacket so here we can see black and white wired rubber jacketed, we also look at the time frame of the house and this is from a 70’s house, early 70’s house and we can see that it’s, you know if you look at the tips of the wire you can see that it’s aluminum all the way through. What we try to do, what they tried to do later, once aluminum had a bad reputation we started bringing out a new type of material called copper clad aluminum or CC8. CC8 was basically aluminum wire with a copper coating on it and it doesn’t work. The idea was that we would get the connectivity of copper without the cost of it. It doesn’t work and if you see CC8 you pretty much have to remove it. Let me go to the next slide here, this is the panel from an inspection in Richmond so this is sort of a Vancouver special in the Richmond area houses built in 72 and this is the best way to tell if you’ve got it. So go to the panel, we’re having a look at the bottom there, you can see those white wires coming out and going into that busbar, it’s sort of a horizontal bar at the bottom, that’s the best place to find aluminum.
15 сен 2024
