Hello all,
I need some help with rewiring my house. I have a plan and I wanted to run it buy the resi guys here. My background is all commercial, industrial, and government work. I've worked with MC cable a hand full of times and I've never touched romex so when it comes to residential work I'm out of my comfort zone. We're planning on expanding our house soon but I need to rewire it before we do that. Our house was built in 1954 and we still have the original knob and tube with the original 30A service. We have a total of 10 receptacles in our house. Another issue of a 1950s house is no insulation in the walls. My plan is to upgrade our service to a 225A service with a 42 Circuit panel. My plan is to go room by room and tear out all of the rock and upgrade one room at a time. Since I'll have a 42 circuit panel I can run a dedicated circuit to each room and not have to worry about space in the panel. This will allow me to do it at my own pace, not have to worry about cut in boxes and fishing romex down finished walls. This is probably overkill but I think it's a solid plan. Is there anything I'm overlooking or potential problems I can run into doing it this way?
Let me preface the advice I'm about to give by saying that the first 10yrs of my career were residential, both budget an extremely high end. Also the bulk of side work I do is in refinishing homes/basements and the like. That being said:
200A service and panel is fine, but if you run two dedicated circuits for lights and outlets, you will run out of breaker space. Instead, plan ahead...
Draw a basic floor plan for your house, where you want/need the switches and outlets, whether or not they need to be 3 ways, 4 ways, etc; low volt; how many and what kind of lights are going into each room; smoke detector locations.
Make a homerun list. Make the master bed outlet circuit a dedicated one. Share one outlet circuit between every two other bedrooms. Dedicate a GFCI circuit for each bathroom. Count up the draw on the lights that you're planning on putting in to determine your lighting circuits.
When you run out each room, leave tails in the ceiling/wall of the other rooms that you're going to feed out or run travelers/ smoke feeds to. Strip the jacket, rage the conductors, and cap them off in the box they're fed from.
Other than that, a couple things I'd recommend:
Only run one or two dedicated phone lines from the kitchen and/or family room to the basement at the load center location. No one puts cod less master stations or hard wired handsets in bedrooms anymore, ever.
Run a cat5e or Cat6 cable with every tv drop that you do. Most TVs are smart today, so the hard wired Ethernet connection is superior for streaming.
In any room where you plan on having just a ceiling light, put in a paddle fan box and run a 3-wire switch leg. On resale, you can say you're pre wired for paddle fans, even if you don't install them now.
In the family room, pre-wire for a wall hung tv, with an outlet feed, and a 1 1/2" conduit running from 5' up the wall into the basement. You can also prewire for surround should you choose.
Finally, run two 2" conduits from the basement to the attic for future or stuff you might miss. Put a good plan together and you should never have to use them.
i know this was long, but I was trying to be comprehensive...
Best of Luck!
