If your home was built between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, there’s a real chance the branch circuits behind your walls are aluminum. Copper prices spiked during those years, and aluminum became the common substitute for the smaller wiring that feeds your everyday outlets and switches. A lot of those homes are still standing and still lived across Northern Colorado, and plenty of homeowners have no idea what’s running through their walls until an inspection or a warm outlet brings it up.
At Daniels Electric we inspect, evaluate, and correct older aluminum branch wiring for homes in Wellington, the surrounding Northern Colorado area, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Sometimes that means a targeted repair. Sometimes it means replacing the wiring entirely. What it never means is a guess. We look at what you actually have before we tell you what it needs.
Aluminum itself isn’t the problem. The connections are. Aluminum behaves a little differently than copper at the point where it meets an outlet, a switch, or a splice. Over decades of heating up under load and cooling back down, those connections can gradually work loose if they weren’t made with hardware built for aluminum. A loose connection runs hotter than a tight one, and heat is what turns a minor issue into one worth addressing.
Most of the time this is slow and quiet. Occasionally it shows itself. A cover plate that feels warm to the touch. A light that flickers for no reason tied to an appliance. A faint smell of hot plastic near a receptacle. None of that means your house is in crisis, but it does mean the wiring deserves a professional set of eyes rather than a wait-and-see approach. If you’re seeing any of it, shut off that circuit at the breaker and give us a call.
Aluminum itself isn’t the problem. The connections are. Aluminum behaves a little differently than copper at the point where it meets an outlet, a switch, or a splice. Over decades of heating up under load and cooling back down, those connections can gradually work loose if they weren’t made with hardware built for aluminum. A loose connection runs hotter than a tight one, and heat is what turns a minor issue into one worth addressing.
Most of the time this is slow and quiet. Occasionally it shows itself. A cover plate that feels warm to the touch. A light that flickers for no reason tied to an appliance. A faint smell of hot plastic near a receptacle. None of that means your house is in crisis, but it does mean the wiring deserves a professional set of eyes rather than a wait-and-see approach. If you’re seeing any of it, shut off that circuit at the breaker and give us a call.
There’s no single right answer, and that’s the point. The fix depends on the condition of the wiring, how the home is laid out, and what you’re planning to do with the place.
When the wiring itself is sound and the issue is at the connections, the work centers on making those connections safe and stable using devices and hardware specifically rated for aluminum, and correcting any terminations that weren’t done properly the first time. It’s a well-established approach for keeping existing aluminum branch wiring in service safely.
When the wiring is more deteriorated, when the home is being remodeled anyway, or when you simply want the peace of mind of a modern system, replacement makes more sense. In that case we remove the old aluminum branch wiring and run new wiring that meets current code, the same way we handle other aging systems like knob and tube. If a full rewire is the right call, we’ll lay out what that involves before anything starts.
We’ll walk you through both paths, what each solves, and what each costs, so the decision is yours and it’s an informed one.
It’s worth saying plainly: aluminum is not a bad material. It’s still the standard, code-accepted choice for large feeders, service entrances, and heavy appliance circuits, and it performs reliably when it’s sized and terminated correctly. The concern with those older homes is specific to the small branch circuits and the connection methods of that era, not aluminum as a whole. So if you’ve got aluminum somewhere in the house, don’t panic. Get it evaluated, and handle what actually needs handling.
If you know or suspect your home has aluminum wiring, the smart first step is finding out what condition it’s actually in. Contact Daniels Electric at (970) 690-4238 and we’ll inspect it, tell you plainly what it needs, and handle the repair or replacement the right way.
