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a general contractor would hire the others and do the carpentry their self if that was their trade. you could also find someone in each trade yourself.
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you will have to upgrade everything on that circuit, everything fed from the fuse or breaker that circuit is on needs to get upgraded. alternately you could run new wiring for just the bathroom back to the main breaker/fuse box; this would require properly terminating the old wiring somewhere (remove it to a junction or cap it in an accessible box (which could be in the bathroom or brought to a wall in the adjacent room).
NEC wants the wires removed. Older wires in themselves can be a hazard do to the smoke they can cause in a fire. This is more specifically related to wires in plenum space.
All wiring powered or not must terminate in a box. KT presents a problem in doing so because you can not terminate the ends in the conventional ‘box’
Say I have a Romex circuit running from one of the house to the other. If I decide it is no longer needed. My options are to remove it completely or if I can not or do not want to remove it I can box it on each end. It would be unacceptable to cut it and leave it unboxed at any point even if it is completely unpowered.
Are you saying he was making a valid assumption? Because I assure you he was not. Maybe it “shouldn’t” have been connected to what it was connected to, but it most definitely was.
It’s weird to me how many people make assumptions about wiring they have no actual knowledge of. Given the amount of do-it-yourself wiring I’ve seen, the only approach that makes any sense to me is to assume that whoever worked on the wiring before you might be a color blind amateur who has no knowledge of wiring conventions, let alone codes, and may in fact be trying to kill you.
I meant it shouldn’t have been connected and I can see why he made that assumption, not that it was a good idea to do so.
Also, that wire can be sold for recycling. Given the current prices, it it’s copper wire, selling it can help pay some of the costs of rewiring.
K&T wiring is safe, & works fine, as long as you leave it alone. Even if the insulation is old & brittle and falls off, the wires are physically separated and won’t touch each other to short out. But if somebody shoves cardboard storage boxes up against the wires in the attic, or pushes insulation bats around them, or anything else that disturbs them, you can have problems.
If you’re already up there where you can see the K&T wiring, it should be easy to replace it. And after you remove the tubes, you can often use those holes to run new romex – can save a lot of work. But you generally have to replace the whole circuit. Fishing through the last 6 feet, where it runs down inside the wall to a wall outlet, may be more work than the whole attic rewiring part.
A suggestion for the OP: there’s a handy tool for this. It consists of a short (3-4’) fiber optic cable, with a built in light, and an eyepiece at one end. You just drill a hole in the wall, insert the cable, and then look through the eyepiece to see what is really there inside the wall. Search for terms like “wall eye” or “wall scope”. They aren’t cheap, but could be worthwhile if you plan to live in an old house for a while and renovate it. You might also be able to rent/borrow one from an electrician or plumber.
Sounds like an excellent excuse to buy a toy. 
or “flexible borescope”. I think fiberscope is the proper term. They cost about $150.
:dubious:
If an assumption is not a good idea to make, then should it not be made ?
I don’t know if this is consistent with other aspects of the code, but whoever rewired my house accomplished this by cutting the wiring for the K&T every five feet or so and letting the ends hang where they may. It’s very visibly disabled so no worries about it being powered.
I never said he should have I said I can see why he did. If you work with people who do professional work you get used to that level of quality. It sounds like the electrician in that case did a poor job or overlooked something, that’s all. That’s the type of thing that leads to unsafe situations arising down the road.
Is it even code to ground a circuit to a water pipe (was it ever)? I can see this causing two problems: 1) as noted above, 2) you might be attempting to ground onto a decommissioned pipe that was just never removed and which no longer has contact with ground.
Like I would know what’s code or not, but if you’re grounding a 2-wire romex circuit from 1950 wouldn’t you just run that ground wire right to the nuetral bus bar?
The K&T was not grounded to the water pipe. It was simply running along beside it. They weren’t touching. There’s actually a seperate ground wire that runs parallel to all of this, but I don’t see how it’s tied to the wiring at all. How is K&T supposed to be grounded?
One of the biggest reasons for getting rid of it is the lack of a grounding conductor.
in the USA where the NEC applies all metallic plumbing has to be grounded to the house electrical grounding system.
previously it was common for those on city water to use the metallic water service entrance pipe as the household grounding electrode. now since in some locations the water service entrance is nonmetallic or the continuity of the house plumbing system being metallic is no longer certain a grounding rod or plate is used now as the grounding electrode.
the plumbing system isn’t used as a grounding conductor in subcircuits though it may be a grounding conductor for the whole system if the water service entrance is the grounding electrode…
the neutral is grounded at the meter and then not after that in most circumstances.
running a third wire separate for a grounding conductor is not to code. if you want a grounded circuit then you must run new cable or conduit.
His WHY was stupid IMO.
EVEN in my limited exposure as DIY handyman as needed for myself, close family and friends, I have seen more than my share of WTF / dangerous electrical, plumbing and whatnot home stuff. And most of that crap was probably done by “professionals”.
If this guy hasnt seen anything NOT to code as professional plumber, he must live in an alternate universe.
The SAFE asssumption is to assume it was done wrong.
The type of thing that leads to unsafe situations is one person doing it wrong AND some other idiot assuming it was done right.
That plumber had no GOOD reason to NOT assume the wires were hot, besides his own laziness and ego.
You ask any “professional” in just about any profession and they will tell you there are significant number of their bretheren that are idiots.
When I say “professional work” I mean the level of work. I know all too well about “professionals” who don’t meet that level, they’re everywhere. It doesn’t exonerate the plumber, if the worst happened it’s he who would suffer. Anyway, forget the plumber. The original point was about removing the knob and tube wiring or disconnecting it and leaving it in the walls. The inspectors here will pass a job where it’s disconnected and the reasonably accessible wiring is removed. In that case it should have been removed or at least disconnected, that’s all.
all that old wiring goes to a fuse panel…take the fuses out…should be a main fuse and sub fuses.
When the electricians do additions they tend to leave the fuse panel and tie to a breaker in the new panel if they didn’t change that part of the house.
When they do full house re-wiring…they snip at the panel, leave much of the old wiring there, and run new wires, unless it is contractual to take out the old stuff.
The old wires should be dead then.
What they seem to have done in my case is snip everything off the old panel, put in a new panel, run lots of romex around for new circuits, but leave some of the old circuits active and tied into a new circuit. I don’t think anything is attached to the old fuse box (this, of course, needs to be verified).
On the piece that the plumber almost cut, the entire thing is visible from the new panel to where he was going to cut: new panel -> romex -> jbox -> 6-inch romex (?) jumper connecting to K&T -> dead plumber. The jbox also has another leg of romex coming out of it for the rest of the new circuit.
So I guess someone did a partial rewire and didn’t follow the “once you touch a circuit you bring the whole thing up to code” rule.
There are lots of baffling things about the way the wiring is run in this house. For example, this particular circuit splits at the jbox into a romex leg and a K&T leg, as I mentioned before. Both halves run along the basement ceiling and are completely exposed, and they go almost exactly the same place. So why replace one and not the other? Most of the length of this old wiring is running right next to new wiring that it’s actually directly connected to back in the other room! Furthermore, the ceiling of the room with the panel in the basement is a twisty maze of romex and K&T, some of which zig-zags across the ceiling and then goes into another room only to split and come back into the room it started in. I don’t have a lot of experience with this stuff, so maybe there are good reasons for that, but it seems completely random to me.
I sort of hope to someday cut my teeth on household wiring by tackling these crazy basement circuits. I can be pretty handy when I want to, and these have the advantage of being pretty well isolated and almost completely exposed, so there’s no fishing in walls or living without a kitchen for weeks if I take a long time. I have a friend who’s a journeyman electrician who just got laid off, so I figure I can hire him for a saturday consultation to feel out whether this is a job I really want to do myself. But I know plenty of people who are dumber and less cautious than me who have done it successfully…
Household wiring is pretty easy once you get a few basics down. If you have a journeyman who can help you get started you’re good. Where do-it-yourselfers get in trouble is when they get outside their comfort zone but don’t realize it. Buy the man a case of beer and get learning. You probably have most of the tools you’ll need but buy a decent meter if you don’t have one and learn to use it. Everything else you can pick up as you need it.
your friend seems like a real good start to plan what has to be done. given time he could explain some of what was done and why. that experience is good for good planning and evaluation of the project. and fishing wire takes two people to do it in a short time, consider him to do the work with you.
just because they didn’t die, the building didn’t burn and the power flowed doesn’t mean it necessarily done correctly. there is a lot of details in making an installation that won’t fail in a year or two and need rework, won’t develop a fire or shock hazard in a few years, bad quality work might look good in the short term and takes a few years for the problems to show up.