Buffalo Rewire · Buffalo & Erie County
A licensed electrical contractor that does one thing: rewiring pre-1950 homes in Buffalo and Erie County.
That is the oldest big-city housing stock in America. Most of it was wired once, around the time it was built, and a lot of it has never been wired again.
Buffalo Rewire is a licensed and insured electrical contractor serving Buffalo and Erie County. We do one thing: knob and tube remediation and whole-house rewiring in pre-1950 homes. No new construction. No commercial work. No service calls in a 1995 colonial.
Two reasons. The first is the work itself. Rewiring a plaster-and-lath house is not a big service call. It is its own trade. Where the cavities run, where balloon framing lets a cable drop from the attic to the basement, where the blocking sits in a Foursquare wall, which ceilings survive a fish and which do not. A generalist learns this the hard way, on your house, at your expense. Most electricians treat rewires as filler work between panel swaps and service calls. That shows in the schedule, in the scope, and in the plaster.
The second reason is what is happening right now. Insurance carriers are non-renewing policies over active knob and tube across Western New York. Home inspectors flag it by name in nearly every pre-sale report on an older house. Where carriers will still write a policy over it, premiums run 50 to 100 percent higher. Homeowners are getting letters with 30 and 60 day deadlines attached. Nobody budgets for this. The letter arrives and a five-figure project is suddenly due before the renewal date. That wave is not slowing down, and it deserves contractors who do this work every day, not when the calendar has a gap.
Pattern knowledge. Buffalo’s housing repeats itself. The double, the Foursquare, the workman’s cottage. Same framing habits, same wall depths, same attic and basement access, block after block. We have been inside your house before, just at a different address. We know before we arrive that a balloon-framed double usually lets us drop cable from the attic to the basement without opening the second-floor walls. We know which plaster takes a clean access hole and which crumbles if you look at it wrong. That knowledge is the difference between fishing a house and gutting it.
Everything in writing. You get a written assessment after the walkthrough and a room-by-room scope before any work starts: what gets fished, what gets cut, how it gets patched, and a number that holds. If we should have seen something on the walkthrough and did not, that is our cost, not yours. Change orders are for genuine unknowns, a junction box buried behind a kitchen soffit, not for things a careful assessment would have caught.
We will also tell you when the answer is smaller than you feared. Some houses flagged for knob and tube were already partially rewired decades ago and need less than the letter implies. Some need a panel upgrade and a few circuits, not a full rewire. We give that answer when it is true, because the alternative is being one more contractor quoting the biggest possible job to a worried homeowner.
If you have a letter or an inspection report in hand, send it to us. We respond within one business day. If you want to see how the job actually unfolds first, read how a rewire actually happens.
We rewire old Buffalo houses. That is the whole company.