Learned the hard way about aluminum wiring in a fixer-upper in Phoenix

Bought a 1970s house last year and was rewiring a bedroom when I found all the outlets had aluminum wire. Thought I could just pigtail it with copper like normal, but after a month the connections started getting hot. An old sparky from the supply house told me I needed CO/ALR rated devices and antioxidant paste. Has anyone else dealt with aluminum wire remediation on a tight budget?

3 comments

3 Comments

owens.laura3d ago

Man oh man, that's the kind of surprise that makes you want to set the whole house on fire yourself just to be done with it. @ward.diana's buddy got off lucky if all he got was a melted switch - I've heard stories where those dodgy connections actually started small electrical fires behind the drywall. You're right about the CO/ALR outlets being mandatory, but don't forget you need that antioxidant paste on every single connection or the whole thing's pointless. The worst part is how expensive those special outlets are compared to regular ones, so on a tight budget you're stuck doing one room at a time like a never-ending home improvement punishment. My advice is to prioritize the kitchen and bathroom first since those have the highest draw appliances and are most likely to cause problems. The efficiency gain is real though, it's wild how much power those bad connections were wasting before.

ward.diana3d ago

Man, aluminum wiring is a beast. My buddy bought a house from the 70s in Tucson and thought he could just wrap the aluminum wire around the copper with some electrical tape and call it good. Three months later his living room light switch melted and the wall got warm enough to fry an egg on. The old timer at the hardware store gave him the same spiel about the special outlets and that pink goop. He ended up just replacing every outlet and switch in the whole house one room at a time over about six months. Took forever but his electric bill dropped like 40 bucks a month after.

milesbarnes3d ago

That drop in the electric bill is actually something people don't talk about enough. Loose connections from aluminum to copper create resistance, which eats power and turns it into heat instead of electricity doing useful work. His wall was basically acting like a space heater before he fixed it. The real hidden cost nobody considers is how aluminum wiring can make your whole electrical system less efficient even when nothing is on fire yet. Every single connection that isn't perfect is wasting a little bit of juice around the clock. So yeah, the safety issue is the big scary one, but the money bleeding out from bad connections adds up way faster than most folks realize.