Started a big rewire this week. At a rough guess, I'd say the house dates back to around the mid-to-late 1800s. It certainly started out as two or three separate terraced cottages, although it's all been knocked into one now and had an extension built on the back, although even that looks as though it must be about 100 years old.

There are plenty of those olde-worlde charms that some people look for: The old kitchen fireplace, a hand-operated water pump still standing outside, the walls faced with local stones set into mortar on the brick walls, and so on. It also has lots of other olde-worlde features, such as sagging floors, uneven walls, and not a single perpendicular or right-angle joint in the whole place!

It's the sort of building that some people just love for its Old English quaintness and character. "They don't build 'em like that anymore," they say.

Well, I see it a slightly different light. The bricks, and the mortar that supposedly holds them together are crumbling away. You only have to show that brick the tip of a drill and it disintegrates in a pile of red dust and rubble at your feet. Getting one fixture box securely fastened to a wall took well over an hour today.

After two solid days crawling through it, I'm now on intimate terms with the attic and roof. I'm sure you're all familiar with lath and plaster. Well on this house, they built the ceilings with straw and plaster! No kidding, it looks like they just fastened straw across the joists and then plastered over it. The owner was set on sinking about 4 downlighters into this ceiling in each room until I pointed out the fire hazard.

The roof itself is full of straw as well. Yes, they fixed straw across the rafters before the tiles went on. By now, of course, half of that straw has disintegrated. Any hammering of cable clips brought down copious quantities of dirt from what remains of the straw roof. Modern fiberglass insulation had been fitted, but by now it's just a filthy chewed up mess from all the muck floating around up there.
(By the way, there are still some thatched houses in this part of England where the roof is nothing but straw!)

Pulling up the second-floor floorboards revealed that the first-floor ceiling is the same straw-and-plaster composition. As for the bearers, it looks like almost every one has had chunks hacked out, replaced, or doubled up over the years.

All of the wiring currently in use is PVC sheathed, but with no ground on the lighting circuit and white instead of yellow on 3-conductor cables, which dates it to the 1950s or early 1960s. Somebody had already replaced the plethora of switch-fuse units with a modern C/B panel, but the old panels left behind suggest a 1950s rewire. (I even found some older lead-sheathed cables cut and abandoned under the upper floorboards.)

"Quaint," it might be in some people's minds. But I see it as a nightmare to rewire and do a halfway decent job.

In any civilized country, this ruin would probably have been bulldozed about 50 years ago!

O.K., that's the end of my rant. I feel better now...

Yup, a lot of that sounds familiar, although I can't say I've run into any straw roofs lately!

Some houses I've worked on are in such a state of disrepair that nothing short of a bulldozer is appropriate. But, as you mentioned, they are too "quaint" to be demolished.

So, I guess we'll just have to wait for them to fall down instead. But, I don't mind rewiring them in the meantime.

Our family lives in an 1913 appartment building that belongs to my father and my uncle (9 appartments, approx. 1000 sq. ft each) "Solid" plastered brick walls on the exterior (mud used as mortar and also as plaster, which means for example the walls separating 2 appartments are so weak that when you start to channel for wiring or let alone 1" gas line the bricks come out on the back side) interior walls 2" solid gypsum ( some predecessor of drywall)
When our neighbour (an old lady of 80) died, we made one big appartment out of the entire 2nd floor. I did a complete rewire. The first wiring I could date dated from 1913 when the house was built.(cloth-and-rubber covered wires in conduit made of asphalted cardboard) Apart from this I found about every possible wiring method and violation.Romex with old color coding, with new color coding, zip cord, pvc sheathed wires in flex and rigid pvc conduit,...
The ceilings were plaster and lath. The lathes were nailed onto the joists, then straw mats were nailed onto the lathes. Finally the plaster was applied. The wiring was just cloth covered single wires laying around loosely between the joists. All connections were twisted and taped, one started arcing and nearly burnt the whole thing down. Once I got bit when I was stripping the 4 layers of wallpaper because the wet walls were too conductive. At this point I decided to screw out the fuse before doing anything with water again. The floors were sagging nearly 2".
I finally ended up doing a complete rewire starting at the meter feeder fuses in the staircase. New meter feeder, relocating meter, have electrician to hook up the meter (200 Euro for 4 hours of labour!) new panel with breakers and whole appartment gfi instead of cartridge fuses, dedicated 16 ampere circuits for washing mashine and dishwasher, everything wired pvc sheathed wire in pvc flex conduit. Now we're in progress of redoing the floors (reawakening lost techniques, no one would do these old oak wood fishbone pattern floors any more, 4 companies suggested using new wood, which looks not nearly as godd as the old)
I'll try to post pics of some of the old work and the after pics.

My house was built in the 1870's...

If you know what a "Jenny Lynn" wall is...

(I'll 'splain later if you don't)

Texas,
I've never been to Austria, but I would imagine that a lot of them were built in similar ways to those in Britain -- Quite different to American buildings in many respects.

Probably the strangest construction I've seen was a house in the Charente area of France. The walls were built entirely from roofing tiles laid flat and overlapping, held together with mortar. The place was built just after WWII, so I can only assume that there was a shortage of materials but somebody had a few thousand tiles to spare. Most peculiar.

Peter,
You're welcome to come and help out! Too late to enjoy the "fun" of the attic though, as all the second floor lighting wiring is finished now. (Yes, I wanted to get the worst part over first! )

Today's work has uncovered some disconnected lengths of rubber-sheathed cable, which I would guess were abandoned in the 1950s rewire. Also, I uncovered a length of abandoned m.i.c.c. (mineral-insulated copper-clad) cable. This is the first time I've ever found m.i.c.c. in residential wiring. It was under the floor of a bedroom above an old boiler room, so I'm guessing that it was part of the wiring to some old furnace. Very strange though: The sheer cost of this stuff and the labor-intensive nature of its installation means that it's usually strictly commercial/industrial.

Virgil,
Please do 'splain! I have no idea what you're talking about!


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-27-2002).]

Taken from http://www.loc.gov/folklife/fcn/Spring92.txt :

Definitely interesting to build a house of roofing tiles!
I forgot to mention that this appartment was the first time I saw aluminum wiring in Austria. Single, pvc sheathed 1 sq. mm wires directly buried in plaster, found in the bathroom, above the sink!
I guess the wiring dates from the 1950ies, because there was no PVC sheathing prior to this. It can't have been installed after 1962 because then the bathroom was completely remodeled and rewired (About the most solid part of the installation, even with red ground wires everywhere (not the old ladie's fault that the water supply line it was connected to was later replaced with plastic), though it involved the bad connection I mentioned earlier.

Virgil,
Interesting stuff! I've seen one house in this area which has vertical planks on cross bearers fixed onto our normal brick walls, but only on the inside. Very unusual.


Wow, I bet that made one terrific Faraday Cage!

Tex,
We've experienced similar problems in this country with earthing as plastic water pipes have become more common. Our IEE started rallying against the use of a water line as the sole method of grounding at least as far back as the 1960s.

I believe that most of Europe (including Austria?) now specifies 1.5 sq. mm as the smallest conductor to be used. In the U.K. our code still allows 1 sq. mm as the smallest.

The 1 sq. mm size is almost equivalent to our old pre-metric 1/.044 lighting cable, except that these days the current rating is much higher, something I dislike.

[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-28-2002).]

Virgil,
up here in Vermont "Jenny-Lynn's" are called Plank houses....

The next stage of work tearing into an end wall has revealed not only straw, but also what appears to be horse-hair!

This is turning into one strange house....

sounds like a case of the "TWILIGHT ZONE".never know whats next.

An update on this job:

All the main lighting and receptacle circuits in the main part of the house are done now, except for installing half a dozen or so light fixtures when the owner has decided what types are wanted. (And two I installed have to be changed!)

Pulling new cables from the main distribution panel up to the void between the floors proved an interesting exercise, as the room above is now a bathroom. Guess where the new bath had been installed? Yep, right across the floorboards over the point where all the cables emerge from the wall and turn! Had to remove the tub to get at it all (I'm sure glad the plumber had fitted individual shut-off valves on the hot and cold to the tub faucets).

Still have all the wiring to the rear extension to tackle yet, and that's going to be the new kitchen. That part has a solid concrete floor though, so everything will have to be routed up into the bathroom floor, along a hallway, under a bedroom, and into the roof void of the extension. Not sure whether I'll just use a sub-panel yet.

By the way, apparently the owner had somebody else in a few months ago to add some lighting and receptacles, got fed up with the length of time he was taking to do everything (among other problems) and threw him out. I've uncovered some of his work -- I'm not impressed.

whew!, don't be next Paul.....

Apparently the owner is not at all happy that the previous guy went off with a fair chunk of money with the job unfinished, and now he's sending them bills saying they still owe him more!

I've already pointed out some of his "workmanship," such as cables joined and just lightly taped under the floorboards instead of in proper junction boxes.

Didn't have the camera in time to catch that lot, but I'll see if I can get some pics from the house later this week.

Here's what the place looks like from the outside:


Notice the cobblestone walls:


And here you can see the later addition to the rear:


I tried to get some shots in the attic, but I don't have a flash on the camera and I couldn't get enough light, but here's the mess of straw, rubble, and hacked woodwork under the upstairs floorboards:




More later.

Some more....

Here's an attempt at wiring a junction for two dimmers to feed spots and uplighters in the living room. Nothing wrong with the connectors he used, but they should be in a proper enclosure. This lot was just stuffed loosely under the floorboards with a couple of turns of tape around it:


This work must have been done by the guy the owner threw out a few months ago. Here's his idea of how to wire the downlighters in the kitchen:


Turning to a mess created at some unknown time in the past, here is a "twin socket" hanging loose that was still being used!





Apart from the problems obviously visible, the cable feeding this outlet is also undersized.

Some more pics from this house. (I decided not to take any of the two dead rats found in the attic! Yuk!)

This twin light switch looks innocent enough:


But instead of a proper fixture box, behind it is just a fabricated "box" of wood:


Several other switches were done the same way. This switch is typical 1950s/1960s style, and the cable dates to 1965 or earlier, so it's probably been like that a long time. This technique seems to have been surprisingly popular at one time, possibly because the old round "tumbler" switches were commonly mounted on a wooden surface pattress.

Another interesting piece of work came to light when I traced a cable to a receptacle and found an NM-type cable disappearing into an old length of heavy-gauge steel conduit to drop down the wall to a receptacle. The only problem was that the cable entering the conduit at the top was a different gauge to that emerging at the bottom!

I tried pulling through a new cable, expecting to find a taped splice buried in the conduit, but couldn't get it to budge. Here's what was hidden behind the plaster in the wall:


Closer examination revealed what must have happened. The large-gauge Imperial-sized cable entering from the top must have been the original 1950s/1960s feed to an electric range. The box is typical of those used for the isolation switch (which normally incorporated a receptacle as well). The conduit then continued down the wall to where the outlet plate for connection to the range would have been.

Somebody must have replaced that outlet with a regular duplex receptacle and abandoned the old control switch. The smaller cable run down to the receptacle from this "junction box" was metric, so it must have been after 1970. To cover the old range/receptacle combination they just shoved a small piece of drywall into the box and then plastered over it. From the drywall and the style of recept below, I would guess this was done in the 1980s or later.

an ocean away, yet such similarities. i bet electrician,carpenter,mason,painter,plasterer,etc fits the job 'sript.


that's a new one on me...


p.s.- that blue trim is ..uh...colorful!

Imperial is just normal English units: feet & inches, pounds & ounces etc.

British Imperial measures have a few differences from U.S. customary units, e.g.:

The Imperial pint is 20 fl. oz. versus the U.S. pint of 16 fl. oz. Our quart and gallon are correspondingly larger.

The cwt is 112 lb. instead of 100, and our ton is therefore 2240 lb. The U.S. ton of 2000 lb. is known as a "short ton."

These are said to be the only examples of something being bigger in Britain than in America!

Those Brits who complain that America corrupted the measurements by changing the size of the gallon are wrong, by the way, because the current U.S. gallon was used in Britain long before the Imperial gallon was standardized.

Have a look here for more info:
www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Imperial+units


The old Imperial-sized cables were designated by number of strands and diameter, e.g. 7/.029 was 7 strands of 0.029" diameter each.

There is a British SWG (Standard Wire Gauge) which was commonly used in radio work. It works in a similar way to AWG with larger numbers for smaller wires, but there's no direct correlation.

Since 1970 house wiring cables have been made to metric specifications, just given as the cross-sectional area in square millimeters (or millimetres to be British about it!).

For a given size (or its nearest equivalent) the older cables were generally a little larger, but easier to work with. Apart from the stranding and sheath markings, another easy-to-spot tell-tale is that metric cables are just plain copper wires but the older types had tinned strands.

Oh yes... That blue is kind of, er, noticeable, isn't it?


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 07-16-2002).]

Finally got this job finished today, even though it meant staying until after 8 p.m. to get done.

There's been some kind of family feud going on, which resulted in a son being evicted yesterday. Not a happy place to work.

I'm sure glad to see the back of this place!