Reading's typical home dates to 1938, which means knob-and-tube remnants, fuse boxes, 60-amp service and ungrounded outlets are still common across the city's older rowhomes and blocks. Some houses have already been updated room by room. Others are still largely on the original wiring, and that's usually where the calls come from.
A fuse box swap to a modern breaker panel is one of the most frequent jobs we do in the city, especially once central air, an electric range or a home office enters the picture. We also retire old knob-and-tube runs still carrying a live circuit and ground or GFCI-protect outlets that were never grounded to begin with.
Met-Ed, also billed as Penelec in parts of Berks County, is the primary electric utility in Reading, with PPL Electric Utilities reaching other pockets of the county. A storm outage on the line is the utility's to fix. Everything from the meter inward, the panel, the wiring, every outlet, is on us, any hour of the day or night.