If you are buying an older home in Belleville or anywhere around the Quinte region, this is the question that can move a closing date.
Insurers in Ontario ask about knob and tube wiring. Some will not write a policy on a house that still has it live. Others will, at a higher premium, or on condition that it is removed within a set period. A few do not ask at all.
That inconsistency is the whole problem: you cannot assume, and you cannot find out from a website. You have to ask your own broker about your own house.
Why they care
Knob and tube was well made. Installed properly and left completely alone, a hundred-year-old installation can still be sound.
The trouble is that no installation has been left alone for a hundred years.
It has been modified. Circuits spliced in over decades, often by people who were not electricians, frequently with tape rather than a proper junction box.
Its insulation has aged. The original insulation was cloth and rubber. After ninety years it is brittle, and brittle insulation cracks when disturbed — which happens every time somebody works in an attic.
It has no ground. Two-wire circuits with no equipment ground. Every three-prong appliance in the house is relying on an adapter or a lie.
And most importantly: it has been buried in insulation. Knob and tube was designed to run through open air, which is how it sheds heat. When a house gets its attic insulated and nobody checks the wiring first, the wiring can no longer cool itself. This is the single biggest reason insurers ask, and it is a genuine risk rather than an actuarial superstition.
What they will usually accept
This varies by insurer, so get the answer in writing from yours before spending anything. That said, the common positions are:
Full removal of all live knob and tube, documented with a Certificate of Inspection. The strongest answer and the most expensive.
Removal from specific areas — typically anywhere insulation is present, or the living space, with allowances for what remains in inaccessible spots.
An inspection report from a licensed electrical contractor confirming what is live, what is abandoned, and what condition it is in. Some insurers will write a policy on that basis alone.
What is generally not accepted: a homeowner’s assurance, a general home inspector’s note, or a panel upgrade on its own. That last one catches people out. A new panel makes the distribution modern; it does nothing about ninety-year-old conductors in your ceilings.
The one thing to do before you buy
If you are looking at a pre-1950 house, call your broker with the address before the conditions come off and ask two questions:
- Will you insure this house as it is?
- If not, what specifically do you require?
Then get a condition inspection that tells you what is actually live versus abandoned — because those are wildly different bills, and a house can have knob and tube visible in the attic that has been dead since 1978.
Doing this in the conditional period means the cost becomes a negotiation. Finding out afterwards means it becomes your problem alone.
What a staged rewire actually looks like
People imagine moving out for a month. It is usually not that.
We stage the work so you keep power throughout:
Stage one — the panel and the service, because everything downstream needs somewhere modern to land.
Stage two — kitchen, furnace, bathroom, laundry. The circuits you cannot live without and the ones carrying the most load.
Stage three — bedrooms and living space. The biggest chunk, and where most of the wall opening happens.
Stage four — the leftovers. Attic lighting, the porch, the garage, the outlet in the hall nobody thinks about.
Only the circuit being worked on is off, and only while it is being worked on. Each stage gets its own notification and its own inspection, so at the end you hold documentation of exactly what was replaced and when — which is precisely what an insurer or a buyer’s lawyer will ask for.
Budget for a plasterer or drywaller afterwards. We cut small and we cut deliberately, but we do not patch and paint, and that line surprises people if nobody mentions it.
The order that saves the most money
If you are also planning insulation, windows, or a kitchen: wiring first.
Every one of those is cheaper before the walls are closed and considerably more expensive after. The most costly version of this job we ever see is the house that was insulated, drywalled and decorated, and then the insurer asked the question.
If you are buying and the house is empty between closing and moving in, that window is the cheapest rewire you will ever get. Nothing to work around, nothing to protect, nobody to inconvenience.
What it costs
A full rewire of a 1,200 square foot home runs roughly $11,000 to $19,000, and the spread is genuinely that wide because access drives everything. A house with a full unfinished basement and a walkable attic is a fraction of the cost of the same square footage with finished space above and below.
Staging spreads it over months or years rather than reducing it — though doing the insurance-critical parts first sometimes gets a policy written while the rest waits, and that on its own can be worth the sequencing.
Full detail on the work and the variables is on the knob and tube removal page.