I've got a bunch of two-prong outlets in my 1990s house that I'm trying to update. I want to plug in my newer appliances but I'm not sure if I can just swap them out myself or if I need an electrician. Do I need to run new wire or something?
You'll need an electrician because swapping the outlet itself won't fix the actual problem - your house wiring from the 1990s likely doesn't have a ground wire running through it, so there's nothing safe to connect to that third prong, and adding grounding would require running new wire through your walls which is a job for a professional.
The real issue is what's actually behind your walls - if your older wiring doesn't have a ground conductor running to those outlets, physically swapping the outlet won't create one, so you'd just be putting a three-prong outlet on a two-wire system, which defeats the purpose. You could run new grounded wire (which is the proper fix), but that's a pretty involved job involving walls and conduit, so most people end up calling an electrician. Before you do that though, it's worth checking if maybe some of your circuits already have ground - hire someone to test a few outlets first, because sometimes older houses surprise you and have partial grounding in certain areas.
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