If your house sits in the older grid around the Main Street Metra station, there’s a real chance the wiring behind your plaster is older than your grandparents. Knob-and-tube ran in homes here from the early 1900s into the 1940s. Cloth-insulated wire showed up next and stuck around into the 1960s. Both were good for their era. Neither was built for a house that now runs a heat pump, an induction range, a couple of EV chargers, and a finished basement full of electronics.
I’m Alexandr Godonoaga. I own Cob Services LLC (license #26-00032356), and my crew has opened up a lot of these walls. This post is the honest walkthrough of what a rewire on one of these homes actually involves, start to finish, so you know what you’re signing up for before anyone pulls a single staple.
How to tell what you’ve got
You don’t need to open a wall to make a decent guess. A few signs point hard toward original wiring.
Two-prong outlets all over the house mean no ground, which means the wiring predates grounding being standard. A fuse box instead of breakers is another tell. So is a basement ceiling with white ceramic knobs and porcelain tubes threaded through the joists, which is knob-and-tube in the flesh. Cloth wiring is sneakier, because from the outside it looks like normal cable, but the fabric jacket gets brittle and crumbly with age, and it tends to fall apart the moment anyone disturbs it.
The other giveaway is behavior. Breakers or fuses that go often, outlets or switch plates that feel warm, lights that dip when the furnace kicks on. We wrote up why an older Downers Grove home’s wiring starts acting up if you want the longer list of symptoms.
A quick caution on knob-and-tube: it can be genuinely dangerous when it’s been buried in blown-in insulation, which traps heat the system was designed to shed into open air. Cloth wiring earns its own worry once the jacket starts shedding. We went deeper on whether old cloth wiring is actually a fire hazard in a separate piece, and the short answer is that it depends on its condition, not just its age.
Why insurers care, and why that often forces the decision
For a lot of homeowners near downtown, the rewire conversation doesn’t start with safety. It starts with an insurance letter.
Plenty of Illinois carriers now refuse to write or renew a policy on a house with active knob-and-tube, and some treat deteriorated cloth wiring the same way. So the rewire becomes the thing standing between you and a policy you can actually keep. That’s also true at resale: a buyer’s inspector flags the wiring, the buyer’s lender gets nervous, and suddenly your sale hinges on electrical work you’d been putting off for a decade.
I’d rather you do it for the safety. But if the insurance letter is what gets you to pick up the phone, that works too.
What a rewire actually involves
Here’s the part people picture wrong. They imagine the whole house torn open at once, plaster everywhere, the family living in a hotel for a month. It’s rarely like that.
We replace the old circuits with new copper that meets current Illinois code, and we do it room by room so the house stays livable. The old knob-and-tube or cloth wiring comes out of the walls, ceilings, and floors. New cable goes in, outlets and switches get updated along the way, and every circuit ties back to a panel that can actually carry the load.
The access question drives most of the work and most of the cost. In an older home near the Metra, the basement is usually unfinished and the attic is reachable, which is a gift, because we can run a lot of new cable through those spaces without touching finished walls. The hard parts are the runs that have to cross a finished first floor to reach a second-floor bedroom. There we fish cable through wall cavities, and where we can’t, we cut small, patchable openings rather than gutting a wall that wasn’t even part of the plan. Good rewires are judged partly by how little drywall and plaster repair they leave behind.
If the panel is also original, which it usually is on a house this old, we replace that first. Feeding shiny new wiring into a tired fuse box or a 60-amp service defeats the point. On a lot of these jobs the panel swap also means ComEd has to disconnect and reconnect the service, and we mapped out how that disconnect-and-reconnect day actually works so it isn’t a mystery when it happens.
While the walls are open is also the cheapest moment you’ll ever get to add what the house was missing: dedicated circuits for the big appliances, proper grounding on every receptacle, an EV charger circuit out to the garage, AFCI and GFCI protection where code now requires it. Pulling those in during the rewire costs a fraction of coming back for them later.
How long it takes and what it costs
Most rewires on a home this size run a few days to about a week. A small single-story near the station can land at the short end. A larger two-story with finished walls everywhere stretches longer, because the fishing is slower.
Cost depends on square footage, how reachable the walls are, and whether the panel needs replacing too. A whole-house rewire on a typical Downers Grove home generally runs $12,000 to $30,000, with the panel upgrade adding another $2,500 to $4,500 when it’s needed. I don’t quote these over the phone, because two houses on the same block can come out thousands apart once I see what’s behind the plaster. The estimate is free and it’s in person, which is the only way to give you a number that’s actually yours.
One more thing worth saying plainly: sometimes a full rewire isn’t what a house needs. A home from the mid-60s through the early 70s might only have aluminum branch wiring that needs corrective connectors, which is a smaller job, and we broke down the AlumiConn versus CopAlum versus full-rewire decision for exactly that situation. If a partial wiring update genuinely solves your problem, that’s what I’ll tell you, rather than selling you the bigger ticket.
The permit and inspection part
Rewiring is permitted work in Downers Grove, and that’s a good thing for you, because it means an independent inspector confirms the job was done right. The Village runs everything through its online portal, enforces the 2020 National Electrical Code with local amendments, and asks for 48 to 72 hours notice on inspections. The Village’s permit page lays out the whole process if you want to read it yourself. We pull the permit, schedule the inspections, and hand you documented, signed-off work at the end, which is exactly the paperwork your insurer or your future buyer will want to see.
When you’re ready
If your house is in the older blocks near the Main Street Metra and any of the signs above sound familiar, the next step is just having someone look. An inspection costs very little and tells you whether you’re facing a full rewire, a partial update, or nothing urgent at all.
Cob Services LLC is licensed and insured in Illinois, family run, and I walk every job and price every estimate myself. Call (630) 427-5923 or request service online and we’ll set up a time to take a look.
Quick answers
Is knob-and-tube wiring illegal in Downers Grove?
It isn’t illegal to have existing knob-and-tube in place, but you can’t extend it under current code, and most insurers won’t cover a home that still runs on it. That combination is usually what pushes homeowners to rewire.
Can you rewire without tearing up all my walls?
Mostly, yes. We use the basement and attic for the long runs and fish cable through wall cavities where we can. Where an opening is unavoidable, we keep it small and patchable. Full demolition is the exception, not the rule.
Do I have to move out during the rewire?
Almost never. Because we work room by room, most families stay in the house the whole time. If a stretch of the job needs the power off, we tell you in advance so you can plan around it.