Aluminum wiring in houses?

[G-ZUS]

Do insurance companies refuse to insure houses with aluminum wiring these days?

[bmeier]

No. The danger is overblown those houses are 40 years old now and still standing..

I owned a townhouse with aluminum. In my opinion it's good practice to add copper pigtails to every connection just to be safe

[98brg2d]

My experience is that coverage may be limited depending on the underwriter.

For example: TD Insurance will not insure you above a Bronze level if you have aluminum wiring even if you have effected repairs (i.e. anything other than complete rewire).

Repairs I have found (in order of effectiveness):

1) Rewire entire house - good luck finding an electrician in Calgary that will do this without asking you to cut the bottom 2 feet of drywall off every wall.
2) Tyco Copalum - high pressure cold welded pigtails, as far as I know there is one licenced contractor in Calgary (Westridge Electric). CPSC certified in the US as a complete permanent repair (equivalent to rewire).
3) Alumiconn - sealed 3 wire strip terminal that replaces marettes/wire nuts. Can be hard to fit into the boxes (three gang with one two way and one three way was not fun...) CPSC certified in the US but insurance companies in Canada don't always care.
4) Arc fault breakers for everything - in an old house you will probably be tripping breakers until you find the bad connections and fix with one of the above methods.
4) Use all aluminum compatible devices. No decora plates or special switches.
5) Use purple marettes and antioxidant paste. This method is not approved in most countries anymore (yay Canada!) since it has been proven to be more dangerous than the original install likely was i.e. more real fires and more under laboratory conditions that straight aluminum.

I have used Alumiconn since it is cheap, available and works the same way your circuit breaker works - with a strip terminal.

Originally posted by bmeier
No. The danger is overblown those houses are 40 years old now and still standing..

I owned a townhouse with aluminum. In my opinion it's good practice to add copper pigtails to every connection just to be safe

Aluminum wiring breaks or loosens due to strain caused by thermal stress, the more times the connection is strained the higher the chance of failure. It doesn't reach some magical steady state where after a certain point you are in the clear, it continues to get closer and closer to failure. If you ever checked an older home it is almost guaranteed that you will find evidence of arcing in original fixtures.

Besides, almost all older homes have had some form of repair whether it is replacing a receptacle that started sparking or simply having the wires tightened. The only homes that haven't had any repair likely also haven't been resold in the last 20 years.

[ZenOps]

I've got aluminum wiring (wired in 1970). Two outlets are a little bit sketchy by my own testing.

But as long as you don't mess with it, the chances of something going wrong are actually extremely slim. The less you bend it, the better - of which you should never be futzing around electrical once its in the walls anyhow.