mm said:
They had cloth romex? I thought the start of romex was after cloth
insulation.
Can't speak for railphotonut, but the house I bought last year has a ton
of cloth "romex". The wire itself is insulated with a plastic like
material, possibly an early vinyl, definitely NOT rubber. It clings to
the copper conductor, and leaves a sticky coating on the wire after it
is stripped. Each conductor is wrapped with tar cloth braid, they are
bundled with a brown kraft paper "string" (think old grocery bag), a
wrap of paper, and another wrap of tar cloth. Where and when ever
possible, I am pulling new ROMEX into place using it as a pull tape. In
those instances where it isn't possible to pull it out, I handle it as
little as possible, though the insulation isn't brittle. It does make a
filthy mess no matter whether removing or reusing it. I believe it was
installed in the fifties, as some of it was plastered into the pink
flamingo bathroom walls. The only reason I know that is I had to
completely gut the bathroom for other reasons. Luckily I found it
without hitting it with a saw, drill, or nail... Some has a silver-blue
outer wrap, other has black. The internal cloth is all black in the
black, and color matched to the wire in the silver-blue. They both have
the white wire covered with white inner insulation.
I also have a lot of that old BX with the cloth wires. Thank goodness
the house was originally built in 1890, before electrification. All of
the upgrades were done later, so there isn't any knob and tube. My
grandmother's 1902 built house in Buffalo wasn't so lucky. Because of
the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, builders were doing K&T installs in
new houses even though electricity was still new and not widely
available. I was still removing K&T in the eighties, and I think I got
the last of it abandoned in 1989 when we built a new dormer and
completely split the upper apartment from the lower. Prior to that the
upper always included utilities even though there were two meters. After
that, the upper was no longer cross wired with downstairs, although
there were two outlets in the lower living room that no longer worked
after that. I just never got around to going in the crawl space and
rewiring those two, as I didn't want to disturb all the abandoned
asbestos steam heating pipes under there. Just goes to show that it is
sometimes better to be late to the game than to be an early adopter...
