Have you ever heard of aluminum wiring in a house? No? There was a time just after World War II when copper became so expensive that home builders cut costs by using aluminum wiring. It was single strand #12 and #16 aluminum.

We bought a house in a Jackson, Michigan, subdivision called Birdland. That was because most of the streets were named after birds, such as Cardinal Crest and Oriole. The houses were contracto-built in the early 1960s. To cut costs, they used the cheaper aluminum wiring. Some of the houses had aluminum studs as well. We didn't know about the aluminum wiring when we bought the house on McConnell Street in Birdland. We soon found out.

The night before we moved in, the wiring in the basement under the kitchen caught fire. Thankfully, my daughter Elizabeth and I had decided to spend the night there. Going down the basement steps for something, I looked up to see sparks and flames on the joists under the kitchen floor near the stairwell. I unplugged the line. Elizabeth and I spent a worried rest of the night. We later learned the problem was the aluminum wiring expanding during weather changes, loosening the wiring connectors. Another problem had been the wiring breaking somewhere along the line, out of sight. The next morning when my husband checked the fuse box, he discovered the aluminum wiring. We checked with the next-door neighbor, learning about the subdivision's aluminum wiring problem. There had been numerous fires in the past and in many houses it had been replaced it with copper wiring. We couldn’t afford to do that. It became a worry all the years we lived there.

Were there dedicated electrical lines in the house? Those are special lines with electrical load limits used especially for kitchen appliances. There were none in this house. And the contractor built it, right? Wrong. We learned that the previous owner bought the house as a shell and finished the interior themselves. There were amateurish problems throughout the house.

Aluminum wiring is not a problem anymore. The aluminum alloy used was changed in 1972, making the wiring somewhat safer. Aluminum wiring was phased out by the mid-1970s. But I know of a subdivision that is still hiding lots of it.