It’s actually quite common to find the remains of it in older houses: wiring has been upgraded, but the ceramic knobs (and often at least some of the wire they support) have been left in place.
My home (built in 1952) still has a mixture of knob/tube and modern wiring, circuit breakers and fuse boxes. One of these days I’ll finish the job and have the whole house upgraded to modern wiring.
Just popped in to point out that one of the reasons that the screw bulb adapters were so common comes from the fact that light alone was the initial selling point of household electrification.
Grain mills and other industrial processors realized that they could run wires from their plants and sell lighting to the local residents. In some cases the homes had one single circuit that fed the light build located in the living/ dining area. A bright incandescent light was a fantastic improvement over oil lamp lighting and gave a family the ability to be more productive into the evening hours as well as socialize longer.
Like all inventions that become common other entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to create enhancements, in this case electric appliances and naturally needed a way to adapt them to the power source.
Short of breaking through some walls, is there a way to know if knob and tube wiring are still in the walls of old buildings? I know the building I live in was likely built around 1910-1920 at the latest (I’ve seen a photo dated 1933 where the whole neighbourhood was well established). The wiring here is old, in the sense that we are told not to plug in things like air conditioners, but the sockets are all typical in appearance and the breaker box was clearly replaced newish sometime in the past 20ish years.
There really aren’t a lot of sockets in this apartment, and it’s a constant source of frustration. Nearly every socket has a powerbar or splitter on it - there also aren’t any ceiling lights in many rooms, so at least one socket has to be used for a lamp, let alone any TVs, DVD/videogame consoles, computers, stereos, small appliances, etc.
The phone and cable wires are all external to the walls, running along the baseboards and around door frames through the entire apartment. These things are supplied through the back alley, but the TV and most phones are at the front of the building, in the office and living room :smack:
So I’m just idly curious what kind of wiring might be back there, and what it might look like. I don’t own the place, so I’m not about to break down the walls to find out!
Retrofitting electricity in most homes wasn’t even as neat as the knob and post wiring…
A fairly good example (though a recreation) can be seen at GE’s “Carousel of Progress” exhibit at Disney World/Land. Act 2 is pretty close to the mark, wires just run everywhere, totally unsafe.
On the Ranch out in the country. As for the phone it had a 6V battery.
:eek:
Not completely bare, I assume?
My grandparents’ house was electrified in 1950. The government (probably New York state, since they lived in an unincorporated area within the township) made a big push in the late 40s and early 50s to run powerlines along rural roads. My mom remembers the workmen putting up the poles and stringing the lines, and running a line to the house. Like janeslogin’s father, my grandfather had to figure out all the wiring inside the house himself.
You’re not alone; the insurance company will require you to rip it out before they’ll insure the house.
This was a huge PITA when I moved into my 1927 house-- I was ok with the knob-and-tube and didn’t ask for a discount based on it, then a few weeks later the insurance company said I needed to spend $1200 and get it all redone. Sigh.
Completely bare in my house.
Remember, 1927 wiring-- this is before durable plastic insulation existed, and cloth insulation (which was used for appliances and such) rotted away quickly, especially in a behind-the-wall environment. This was also before things like blown-in insulation that could short-circuit the lines.
They didn’t wire this way because they *wanted *to start fires, they just hadn’t invented any better way of doing it yet.
If you can get the wires connected, most modern electronics equipment would just work. Most stuff these days uses what’s called a switched mode power supply, which is often happy to run at any voltage from 90 to 240, and any frequency (including DC). So even those funny 25 hz systems would work just fine.
My sister’s house was built in the late teens and part of the main floor still has knob and tube wiring.I would say it has maybe one outlet per wall at the most.There were few electric appliances at the time,but it looks like they had the forsite to install outlets anyway.
The wiring was most likely replaced when the newer panel was installed.If you have access to the attic,you can take a look there.
No, we don’t have access to an attic (we live on the 2nd floor of a 3-storey walkup). There are a ton of different inlets and connectors and mysterious stuff hanging from the brick wall facing the back alley, though - clearly different iterations of power and other stuff going into the building over the years. It’s rather fascinating.
Finally got the knob & tube wiring replaced last summer. That knob and tube means that you can’t pull the new wire cable through with the old wire. We had to cut access holes in the walls. I ended up with a new tool because none of the saws could get through the lath and plaster. So now I own an angle grinder.
Not all of the wiring was knob & tube. Some had been installed later, along with the breaker box. The old wiring was paper-wrapped and may have had some sort of insulation under the paper. There was bare wire showing through relaxed paper spirals in the attic, though, so maybe not.
Oddly, the insurance didn’t say a thing about the old wiring. It was specifically noted on the inspection papers, too.
Sometime soon way may get around to patching the holes in the walls. My son is pushing for removing the lath and plaster and putting in drywall. I’m resisting. Sounds like a gawdawful mess.
Back to the OP. I always wondered how long it took to achieve standardization of things like the Edison base for light bulbs, and more notably the standardized plug and socket, with tines of a certain shape a certain distance apart. The Edison base was probably pushed along rapidly by the company’s dominance in lamp sales, but there must have been several alternatives to the now-standard NEMA plug and socket. Think of what we’re going through with various device chargers these days, even though the electrical requirements are often identical.
Lots of this is scary, though I’m pushing 60 and experienced it firsthand. What was weird about our house, built in '58 in suburban Chicago, is that we have one duplex outlet with one socket on one circuit and the other on a completely different circuit. Made swapping out the outlet at night, in the dark, with the only illumination coming from touching the wrong thing with my screwdriver…challenging. But not so bad as finding which breaker controlled the other outlet.
I was in a hurry.
There is still the Mogul lamp base, which is rather like the standard Edison light bulb base, only much larger. Used mostly on high-wattage lamps, often 3-way bulbs.
There are also some other lamp sockets used for stage lighting.
When I lived in a residence house in college, it still had some of the old wiring. The basement had knob and tube. For outlets, they had the intermediate tech - the wire was that cloth-insulated stuff, I think there was tar or something inside black and sticky.
To do outlets - lucky if there were two in the room - the wire often ran along the wall to a wall-mounted box. Soft wire running exposed along the wall? Totally not code nowadays. I suspect that was put in during the 40’s give or take to retrofit the rooms for “modern” college use. The toaster was constantly blowing the breaker for the floor.
BTW, a frat house down the way did replace lathe-and-plaster on one wall when the building inspector came by and said an open hole was not allowed (one punch too many on the wall?). Yes, it was messy. The stupid thing - these had been relatively nice homes, big front rooms, servants rear staircase, fancy entrance. They ripped out the plaster wall over an inch thick, and replaced it with drywall half as thick. There was a gap between the wall and the fancy ceiling cornice more than a inch wide. Basically, once you start you can’t stop or it looks awful. Plus, typical teenagers, once they had nailed up the drywall to satisfy the inspector, they never finished the joints. I’m surprised the gap at each corner didn’t set off the inspector.
Sadly, the REC had a rule that a farm could not connect to the grid if it had a functional wind charger. Many were disabled by a couple shots from a rifle to save climbing the tower.