Knob and Tube Out, 200-Amp Service and EV Charger In, Vancouver, WA

This is the whole list, done at once. An older home in Vancouver, Clark County still had knob and tube in it, a panel that had been added to until there was no more room, no meaningful grounding, and an EV in the driveway with nowhere to plug in. Newman Electric replaced the service, pulled the old wiring out and left the house ready for the next thirty years.

Why these four jobs belong together

Knob and tube removal, a service upgrade, grounding corrections and an EV circuit get quoted separately and are far cheaper together:

• The panel is coming off the wall anyway. Re-landing circuits is the expensive part, and doing it once instead of twice is the entire saving.
• New wiring needs somewhere to land. Pulling Romex to replace knob and tube into a panel with no spaces left just moves the problem.
• Grounding gets corrected at the service. A pre-war system frequently has no equipment ground worth the name, and the service replacement is the moment that gets fixed rather than inherited.
• A 60-amp EV circuit needs capacity that a 100-amp service may not have. Doing the charger after the upgrade means it lands in a panel that can carry it.

That is what makes a new meter main and panel the right anchor for a project like this rather than one line item among four. Our breakdown of what a service upgrade runs covers how the numbers stack when the work is combined.

Romex in place of knob and tube

The remaining knob and tube came out and was replaced with modern NM cable.

The important word is remaining. Almost nobody removes all of it in one go, because a lot of it is buried in finished walls and ceilings that nobody is opening. What you do is remove everything accessible, everything feeding a circuit that matters, and everything an insurer or an inspector will find, and you leave the house with a documented picture of what is left.

The alternative, which is common and bad, is abandoning knob and tube in place while leaving it energized somewhere nobody remembers. That is how a house ends up with live century-old conductors in an attic that a future owner walks on. More on that in our piece on removing knob and tube.

The photograph that explains the job

Look at the before shot of the old panel. Conductors leave the enclosure in every direction, splices sit outside the box, and there is no plausible way to trace what feeds what.

That is not unusual on a house of this age. It is what happens when every addition over sixty years was made by whoever was cheapest that week. A service replacement is the only realistic way to reset it, because there is no partial fix that leaves you with a panel you can trust.

Charger last, deliberately

The 60-amp hardwired EV charger circuit went in after the new service was energized, which is the right order and not always the order people want.

Running a charger circuit off an old panel and then upgrading the service later means paying to move it. Doing the service first means a hardwired EV charger lands once, on a panel with capacity, with the load calculation already done.

Older Vancouver home with cloth wiring, a full panel and an EV on the way? Call 360-828-7143 or modernise the service in one visit rather than four.