We now think that circuit eight is actually the house's original wiring. The whole building just had one fuse. We came to that hypothesis because Eight runs every overhead light in the house except for one over the kitchen sink, which is a retrofit anyway. It also runs some miscellanous outlets on the second floor.

Four outlets and seven or eight lights seemed a bit excessive for one 20 amp circuit, especially since there are fifteen other circuits. So we're going to add a new circuit to the basement power panel, and the second floor wiring we're replacing will be on that one, while the first floor lights can remain on Eight.

Annoyingly, we still can't find how power gets to the wiring in the attic. We know where the power for it leaves the basement, and can trace it until it goes into the first floor ceiling. Then it apparently disappears. We thought we'd traced every wire that leads into the attic, but we just could not discover how the power gets to the top. Nikola Tesla may be involoved.

So today we decided to solve it the empirical fashion. We ran the new power cable from the basement to the attic, which took some effort, since we did it from an external wall, and had trouble getting from the first floor into the basement. Then we started ripping out knob and tube and replacing with nice modern romex cable. We've done a bit over half the attic and replaced one ungrounded outlet and are almost done with the master bedroom overhead light.

Good times, good times!

Posted by: Boviate at 08:25 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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