My house (built in 1963) also only had ungrounded outlets. The thing is… all the boxes were grounded. The previous owners had just never run a ground wire from the back of the box to the outlet.
After we bought the house, I bought about 10’ of wire and 50 grounded outlets, and rewired every single outlet in the house. Not my most exciting weekend, but it’s been great ever since. It’s worth checking.
They have varied. And I think cheap is probably relative to other people I’ve had out to the house and paid a fortune to, like f’n HVAC techs.
I had one remote bedroom that needed a new outlet on the wall = $90, a single electrician. I consider that lower than normal.
I had a 20 amp circuit installed and ran separately up to my upstairs office. That required a run from the box outside and up to the office, installing the circuit, etc. $320, an electrician and his assistant. I consider this actually a good deal considering they had to run conduit out of my box, around and up to the office upstairs, etc.
I had some outdoor receptacles stop working so had one out to fix those. Loose wiring, could have started a fire, I’m glad I had someone come out. $125, one electrician. Probably about the right market rate here.
The more you know and can provide to the electrician, the more time that saves. Know which circuit, make sure it’s marked, which switch(es) control that circuit, what other things are on that circuit, what the symptoms are for that power dimming, etc. It sounds like you know all that.
It can definitely get expensive. I want to get an outlet put in my bathroom so I can get one of those Japanese waifu toilets and it would cost a small fortune. Half as much as the robocrapper itself and they are not cheap.
Ah, gotcha. That’s what I was guessing. Does GFCI behave like grounded or ungrounded on this front? My best friend is an electrician, so I may have her upgrade my TV’s outlet before I upgrade to something fancy.
I would not install a GFCI outlet at your TV. You don’t need that protection, GFCI’s are only really needed if there is a worry of water causing a short that could deliver a shock to someone using the outlet. A regular properly installed and grounded outlet is just fine, just add on a surge protector (a properly rated one, not just a power strip) and you will be fine.
That’s what I inherited when whoever updated my house was trying to get it up to code. I’m just trying to figure out how useless the current surge protector is.
They are designed to do different things. A GFCI is there to protect you, the human, from a misbehaving device that is leaking electricity and trying to kill you. It doesn’t need a ground for that, it will just trip open like a circuit breaker. A surge protector is there to protect your device from being killed by an oopsie electrical surge from the outlet. It cannot really work without a ground since it is made to divert the extra power to the ground wire as it’s protection method.
A surge protector plugged into a GFCI on a 2-wire circuit is no different than if it was plugged into a 2-wire outlet, it’s just a power strip now.
An update:
I installed a UPS/surge protector on my AV equipment and for a while I thought it solved the problem - the “doorbell issue” went away. However, after a little bit it’s clear the issue is not resolved. We still have the TV power cycling when the fireplace fan or the furnace cut on/off.
So it’s a lot better but the issue is not resolved. Next step is to call in my friendly local electrician to diagnose and fix.
Good luck, Charlatan. Hopefully that won’t be an expensive call.