What to wire to the floor above while the basement ceiling is open

A basement ceiling comes open in Lockport for a few reasons. The basement is finally getting finished. A leak from the upstairs bathroom took a section of drywall with it. Or the basement was never finished, and the joists have been bare since the house was built and are about to be covered. Whichever it is, the kitchen and the bedrooms above sit on those joists, and for a few weeks an electrician can reach the bottom of every wall up there.

Why is an open basement ceiling the cheapest time to wire the floor above?

A new circuit to an upstairs room starts at the panel, crosses the basement ceiling and comes up through the floor plate into the wall where the outlet or switch goes. With the ceiling open, the run goes in conduit along bare joists, and the room upstairs gets a new box cut in and little else. That is home wiring in Lockport at its least disruptive.

The same circuit after the basement ceiling is finished is slower work. The run gets fished through closed joist bays, with access holes cut in the new drywall to get around blocking and ductwork, and every hole gets patched and painted on a ceiling that may be a month old.

What upstairs circuits should go in while the joists are bare?

The ones you have been working around. Most houses have a short list of things that share a circuit they should not, or an outlet that ended up in the wrong place when the furniture moved in. Room by room, the usual candidates:

• The dishwasher, the microwave and the disposal in the kitchen, each on its own circuit, so the microwave stops taking the dishwasher down with it.
• One more kitchen countertop outlet where the coffee maker actually lives.
• A bathroom exhaust fan on its own switch instead of coming on with the light, so it can run after a shower.
• A circuit for a bedroom window unit that is not shared with the lamps and the phone chargers.
• Outlets where the bed and the TV sit now, instead of behind the dresser where the builder put them.

In the ranches west of downtown the bedrooms sit on the main floor over the basement, so every bedroom is on this list. In the two-stories east of the canal the bedrooms are a floor further up and out of reach from below, and the list shrinks to the kitchen, the half bath and the front rooms.

Will the panel take them, or does the basement get a subpanel?

It depends on what the main panel already carries. In the 1995 to 2010 two-stories east of the canal the main panel often looks like it has room and does not, once the finished basement and a hot tub have taken their share. In the ranches toward Crest Hill a 100-amp service may not have much to give. A subpanel in the basement is the usual answer when the main is out of room.

A basement being finished is the natural place for one. It sits a few feet from the open ceiling and takes the new basement circuits, and the runs from it to the floor above stay short. Where the circuits land can change the list, so the panel question gets answered first.

What does the old wire above the ceiling tell you?

Whatever has been hidden above the old ceiling, or never covered at all, is in plain sight for a few weeks, and some of it is worth an electrician’s eye before it disappears again.

In the ranch and split-level blocks built between 1965 and 1973, the branch circuits may be aluminum. The cable jacket is often printed with “AL” or “ALUMINUM”, and the conductor showing at a cut end is dull silver instead of copper. What that means for the rest of the house is its own job, covered on the wiring page. While the ceiling is open, the thing to avoid is a new circuit tapped off an old aluminum run in a joist bay to save a few feet. New circuits start at the panel.

In Fairmont the joists of the older houses can still carry cloth-covered knob-and-tube on porcelain knobs, and the question there is whether any of it is still live. A house that still has fuses in the basement is a bigger conversation, and moving an old Lockport house off fuses covers it.

Any age of house can show splices twisted and taped in the open with no box around them, two-wire cable with no ground running to rooms that now have three-prong outlets, and now and then a lamp cord stapled along a joist to a light someone added decades ago. None of it has to stop the project. The splices and the lamp cord get fixed while the bay is open, and the electrician says which of the rest belongs on a later estimate.

Should an empty conduit go in now for a charger or a generator later?

If a charger or a standby generator is likely in the next few years, yes. An empty conduit with a pull line from the panel toward the garage wall or the outside wall costs little next to a future job that would have to open the finished ceiling.

Later, the new circuit gets pulled through pipe that is already there, which is one of the reasons Lockport wiring goes in conduit. Tell the electrician where the charger or the generator pad is likely to end up, and the spare run gets pointed that way.

When does the electrician need the ceiling, and when can it close?

The electrician comes in after the framing, the plumbing and the ductwork, and before insulation and drywall. Plumbing drains and ducts have little room to move, so they go in first and the wiring finds its way around them. Then the work gets its rough inspection before anything covers it, and what the rough inspection looks at is on the permits page.

For a ceiling pulled after a leak, the order is the same on a smaller scale. The plumber fixes the leak, the electrician does any runs while the bay is open, and the drywaller is booked for after the inspection signs off.

What does a new circuit cost while the ceiling is open?

One new 20-amp circuit from a panel with room runs $350 to $800 in Lockport, and what a new circuit costs sits beside the other wiring prices.

What moves it most is distance from the panel. A dishwasher over the panel is a short run, and a bedroom at the far end of a ranch is a long one. If the main panel has no room, a basement subpanel at $900 to $1,800 comes first, and every circuit after it lands there.

The electrician walks the open ceiling and the rooms above together, and the circuit list and the panel question come back on one estimate.