Is it possible to avoid a ~$40 fee for a 220-input transaction? I want to transfer all my BTC from my old Electrum wallet to a new one, so that I can claim Bcash using Electron Cash without risking losing my BTC. The problem is that my ~0.143 BTC came from hundreds of transactions (cloud mining, faucets, etc.) and even with the lowest fee on the Electrum slider (confirmed within 25 blocks), the total fee is 0.013 BTC!

Is there any way I can avoid such a huge fee, while ensuring that my money is sent. There is a 'replaceable' fee option in Electrum. Does that mean that I could try to set the fee/kB very low and up it if nothing happens, without risking my BTC getting lost?

UPDATE: I sent a transaction off with replaceable fees at ~8 satoshi/byte, thinking that there was nothing to lose. It was confirmed in less than an hour :-)
bitcoinfees.21.co shows that fees are fairly low currently. You may try to export keys from your old electrum wallet, and load them into a new Electrum wallet (then you don't need to "transfer"), and go from there. The newer version allows to set tx fees in Saoshi/Byte. 
Alternativly:
If you are on OpenBSD, Linux or MAC, you could give it a try with these shell scripts: github.com/pebwindkraft/trx_cl_suite (you don't want to provide your private keys or similiar to anyone!). 
I used the tools last recently to create manually a tx (c9908124e59a2794f3807b366be7d235ff7654251adcdf396e209236341‌​b3c32) with 20 Satoshis per Byte, having a size of 18KBytes.