Gas or All-Electric in Your Altadena Rebuild: Keep the Gas, but Build Electric-Ready

The confusion usually comes from blending two different sets of rules together. One is California's energy code, called Title 24, which the state rewrites every three years and which every new house in Altadena has to meet. The other is a local all-electric ordinance, the kind some California cities passed to keep natural gas out of new construction. Those are not the same thing, and right now only one of them actually applies to your rebuild.

Once you pull them apart, the picture gets a lot clearer. You can still put a gas furnace, a gas water heater, and a gas range in your new home. What changed is what the code asks you to build alongside that gas, and the smart answer leans heavily on how your electrical panel and service are set up. Here is how the pieces fit together for an Altadena rebuild.

Where the All-Electric Idea Came From

For a few years it looked like all-electric construction was on its way to becoming mandatory across Los Angeles County. The County had been working toward rules that would steer new buildings away from natural gas, part of a wider climate effort. Then a federal court changed the math.

In California Restaurant Association v. City of Berkeley, the Ninth Circuit ruled in 2023 that a federal law, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, bars local governments from effectively banning natural gas appliances through their building codes. The court declined to reconsider in early 2024, and Berkeley agreed to repeal its ban. After that decision, Los Angeles County put its own all-electric effort on hold. As of 2026 there is no County ordinance forcing your Altadena rebuild to be all-electric. The requirements that do bind you come from the state energy code instead.

What the 2025 Energy Code Actually Requires

Title 24 is written to make the most efficient equipment the default, and in the current edition that equipment is the heat pump. Under the prescriptive path, the plain checklist most homes follow, the code assumes a heat pump for space heating and a heat pump for water heating. Build to that baseline and you comply without much modeling.

Gas is where the second path comes in. Title 24 also allows a performance path, where an energy consultant models the whole house and shows it meets an overall energy budget. A gas furnace or gas water heater is still allowed on that path, but because gas scores worse than a heat pump in the model, you have to make up the difference somewhere else, usually with a tighter building envelope, better windows, or added efficiency elsewhere. Which edition applies to you comes down to timing: the 2025 code took effect for permit applications submitted on or after January 1, 2026, and applications filed before that date fall under the 2022 code.

Keeping Gas Means Building Electric-Ready

The part that catches people off guard is what the code asks for when you do choose gas. It requires the house to be built electric-ready. In plain terms, that means the rebuild is wired and laid out so an electric appliance can replace a gas one later without opening walls: a dedicated 240-volt circuit run to the furnace, the water heater, the cooktop, and the dryer, reserved space in the electrical panel for the future breakers, and a location sized for a heat pump water heater.

If that logic sounds familiar, it is the same idea as the solar-ready requirement. You are not forced to install the electric equipment now, but you are required to build the house so it can accept it later. That work is inexpensive while the framing is open and expensive once the drywall is up, which is exactly why it belongs in the plans before your rebuild goes vertical.

The Panel and Service Behind the Decision

Whether you go all-electric or keep gas and build electric-ready, the decision runs straight through your electrical panel. A house that heats its rooms, heats its water, cooks, and dries clothes on electricity pulls more power than one that hands some of those jobs to gas, so the panel and the service feeding it need to be sized for that heavier potential load from the start.

This is one more reason to settle the question early rather than mid-framing. Sizing the panel and running the heavier circuits during the rebuild costs far less than going back for them later. If you keep gas, you are also committing to a live gas line, which on an Altadena lot means coordinating a reconnection with the gas utility on top of everything else the rebuild already asks of you.

Like-for-Like Does Not Get You Out of It

Homeowners on the like-for-like permitting track sometimes assume that rebuilding what they had also means keeping the old systems and the old code. It does not work that way. Like-for-like speeds up plan review, but the house that goes up is new construction, and new construction meets the current energy code. The same is true of the interior fire sprinklers and the Chapter 7A hardening that apply no matter which track you take. The energy code is simply one more current requirement that rides along with a new house, however faithfully it copies the old footprint.

How to Decide for Your Rebuild

For most Altadena rebuilds the real question is not whether the state will let you keep gas, because it will. It is whether a live gas line is worth it once you realize you are building the house electric-ready either way. Some homeowners want a gas range badly enough to keep the line for that alone. Others look at the wiring they already have to install and the panel they are already sizing up and decide that going all-electric is simpler than maintaining two energy sources in the same house. Neither answer is wrong, but the costs and tradeoffs are easiest to weigh before the plans are final.

If you are weighing gas against all-electric for your Eaton Fire rebuild, the team at 1st Choice Design and Development is glad to walk through your lot, your panel, and your plans and lay out what each path actually costs to build. It is a decision that gets much easier once the wiring and the equipment are drawn out in front of you.