What was the wire called that was two conductor with rubber insulation, no ground and was jacketed with a cotton weave?

Are you talking about the old Romex or the brown cloth covered lamp cord

Greg:
Was the brand name 'Loomex' or something close to that for the 'old' "romex"??

I think Loomex was Canadian Romex. Loom was the slip on insulating sleeves for K&T and I think they built off that name. Romex was from the Rome cable company as a follow on product for BX.

That beats coming from Mexico and building off the Loo.

Greg, "old" romex. Each of the two wires are rubber coated and the outer jacket is weaved string which is cotton I do believe. I do believe but not certain that each rubber coated wire is also wrapped in the cotton? Weaved jacket but not certain

I am trying to remember the real old Romex. I grew up with the kind that had TW insulation, maybe a ground, maybe not and the shiny silver painted woven jacket. I may still have a piece that I cut out of this 1963 house but it is newer than the oldest I have seen.

Yes, Greg...that is what I was talking about. Old, silver, really made your bare hands black, & TW or maybe RH conductors. Some had a reduced AWG bare ground, some did not.

The stuff here uses a 16ga ground on 12 and 18ga on 14. The house I grew up in (built 1953) used the same wire. I think it was all TW wire by then.

Silver? Or was the conductor tinned?

Silver strikes me as too pricy -- exotic.

Tesla:
The jacket was silver colored. It used to flake off when you touched or worked with it in a panel change, or service upgrade.

It's a shame I didn't grab one of the nicer pieces of wire from a crawl space we just did down in OCNJ post-Sandy, it was still reasonably intact enough to read the jacket and fur the description.

Whenever it gets wet it falls right apart, no t-strippers needed!

John...

I was referring directly to the conductor itself being tinned/silvered -- not the insulation or sheathing jacket.


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It's not enough that they know how to fly a plane...

The question is, "Did they have fish for diner?"

I have seen tinned wire Romex but it was real old stuff. Maybe from the solder pot days.

Boy, I used to work with a lot of that old stuff around here. The towns I worked in were 100-200 years old. There was a lot of K&T, old RX, old BX, etc. I even sent some photos of some of the old crow foot boxes, rosettes, etc. They are posted over in the nostalgia picture forum.

I think that is type NM cable. It has TW inside. Late 50's early 60's I think it had no ground. Then mid to late 60's it had a #16 ground. I have worked in some places that were wired with both and they just put the ground in the back of the box, because some had grounds and some didn't.

Ob

The house I grew up in had the kinda green-silverish woven jacket over TW with a 16 ground.. It was Paranite Parasyn. The all silver kind was Anaconda Densheath or Hatfield Hatvenol if I remember right. For some reason I think Circle wire had a version as well.

Obsaleet,

Those ground wires tied to the back of the box were the worst thing to work with. If you didn't know how that was wired, you would loosen the nut on the inside of the box and then you were screwed, because you couldn't tighten it back up. Nor could you attach a new ground wire to it. I used to tell all me helpers, if you don't see the ground wire inside of the box, check for a bolt/nut on the bottom of the box. Then check for proper grounding of the box. More than likely, the box was properly grounded on the outside back of the box. Then we would have to use a ground clip to ground the new wire to the same box.

I cant remember where I saw it but apparently for the tinned conductor was used because of a chemical compound in the insulation that would react with copper. Sulfur comes to mind

Tinning is particularly desirable if you're intending to solder a connection.

Tinning is still seen on switchboard bussing.

You can still purchase silver plating in solution for direct application to hot spots on high power bussing. It's very pricy.

For absolute corrosion resistance gold is used.

The reason it's used as burial money is because it, alone, can take it for centuries without degradation.

I'm sure the original reason for tinning the cores was to protect the copper from chemicals in rubber insulation. If I recall correctly early PVC insulated cable in UK was still plated, then it occured to someone that this was a needless cost, and bare copper in PVC started.

Exactly. The manufacturing process of rubber involves vulcanisation, which is done using sulfur. The sulfur would corrode copper, therefore any rubber isolated copper wire is tinned.

Many people mistake tinned copper for aluminium.

Even today's rubber cords have tinned copper wires (H05RR-F and H07RN-F are the European designations).

I didn't think they used real rubber for anything these days.

Well, synthetic rubber is quite similar (at least the manufacturing process), but apparently even real rubber is still used (in the European wire designations R is synthetic rubber and N is real and there are both RN and RR cords, the first letter is the conductor isolation, the second the outer sheath).

Also in the old K&T days, the EC would solder all of their splices. Then they would wrap it with rubber tape, and then friction tape over that.