Fishing Wires In 100 Year Old House

What I have done a couple of times already is tie a small nut (3/8") to the end of a string line. It fits through small holes, and offers just enough weight to pull the string down. I slowly let the string drop, jiggling it up and down a few times, or swinging it side to side, if it gets stuck on a blob of plaster or something, until it reaches the bottom. It doesn't have to line up with the hole below, just get fairly close. I then take a piece of wire with a little hook bent into the end, to reach up through the bottom hole and fish around in the wall to catch the string. Once I have the string out, I can tape it to the actual electrical cable and pull it up through the wall.

It works fine as long as there's no blocking in the wall.

Anthony

Reply to
HerHusband
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Other things that sometimes work good in the walls are bead chain (like used on sink stoppers) and sash chain. These are very flexible and will pile up and spill down thru holes when shaken. They are also very easy to snag with a hooked wire. I also found that a folded over and twisted piece of heavy solder tied to a light string could be jiggled around and made to fall thru small holes. A cotton ball on a thread with a powerful shop vacuum will sometimes do wonders. A long drill bit, preferably flexible, one person above with string, chain, and wire, and another below with stiff and flexible wire hooks can connect and pull a wire nearly anywhere. Did it many times for many years.

Don Young

Reply to
Don Young

You may also find, if the house is post-and-beam, heavy timbers that you don't especially want to put holes in.

If you're re-wiring, wouldn't this be a good time to re-insulate as well? If you're going to be doing both anywhere near the same time period, you're better off just opening the walls.

Reply to
Goedjn

In our case, the house is standard platform construction; studs, joists, and rafters.

My in-laws house needs a LOT of improvements, including insulating, a complete gutting and rebuilding of the rotten bathroom, etc. But they both have serious health issues and are living on a fixed income. So we're working off of very limited funds they've saved up over the years, and what little we can afford to contribute ourselves. Their home insurance is sky high because the electrical wiring was a fire waiting to happen and they heat with space heaters. So I'm replacing the wiring and adding in some permanent wall heaters.

As it is, I just had to replace 90% of the plumbing for what started as a leaky faucet. You know "while you're here, can you take a look at our faucet...". They had an old wall mount faucet in their kitchen that was leaking around the stem. Turned out to be a rusted and broken spout. I couldn't find a new spout, but I did track down a replacement faucet. Of course, when I tried to remove the faucet, the rusted pipes broke instead. When I tried to replace the broken pipe, another section farther down the line broke. It continued to escalate till I was halfway through the house! :) So I just replaced the majority of the plumbing with new pipe, and installed a new sink with a standard deck mount faucet.

Anyway, the moral of this story is to avoid the "might as well" syndrome. It has a way of quickly spiraling out of control around that place! :)

Anthony

Reply to
HerHusband

Eww, and I thought our knob and tube wiring on the INSIDE was bad enough!

Lots of good advice already. We're almost done doing our 80 year old house without opening any walls, so I'll add a few things we've learned:

- Find your main vent stack. If your house is like ours, you may well have a TON of space around it to run wires through. We tried several other approaches to getting wires from the basement to the attic (through two stories) before wising up to this one.

- Cutting into baseboards is often easier than cutting lath and plaster. (Even when those baseboards are OAK!) Our lath and plaster doesn't come down much below the top of the baseboards.

- Pulling baseboards and/or crown moulding off, running wire, and reassembling is relatively easy. You will spend a bit of time with putty and paint after you put the trim back, but it's much easier than patching lath and plaster. (Pulling down the crown moulding allowed us to wire the ceiling lights on the first floor without using surface conduit or making huge holes.)

- We got very little use out of the long flexible drill bits, but tons of use out of the 18 inch (or longer) -rigid- drill bit extenders. Those are great, since you can swap out bits as they get dull, and you can use a couple of them together while working in tight spaces where a longer extender wouldn't fit at all. Most of our interior walls had firestops at about 5 feet from the floor.

- Fish tape is ok, but fish sticks are better unless you need to take a bend. Either may get stuck on the keying inside lath and plaster walls, but fish tape is especially evil in this regard. I understand it's great in conduit, but we did very little conduit.

- Pull with gravity when possible. (Pull from attic from outlet box, not from outlet box to attic.) Pull with a partner whenever possible. One person pushes the line into the space you're pulling through, the other person pulls out at the end, keeping light tension on the line at all times, to prevent getting hung up on lath and plaster keys.

- Dental floss with a small weight (like a nut) on the end works better than fish tape as long as you're working with gravity.

- We also used about 15 feet of flexible, skinny chain. You can drop it down from the attic and as long as some of it hits the hole in the mid-wall brace you've just drilled, it will fall through to the outlet hole.

- If your chain sticks to a magnet, you can attempt to catch it with a small but powerful magnet connected to a fish stick. This worked much better for us than trying to get two fish tapes to hook, but sometimes it just didn't work at all, if there were nails, etc in the space we were trying to fish through.

- If you've already got knob and tube running through your joists, consider using those holes (after removing the porcelain inserts) to run your wires, rather than drilling new holes and further weakening the structure.

Hope that helps! :)

Reply to
CAS

CAS,

Thanks for the great tips!

My in-laws house is a real mess when it comes to wiring. From what I can tell the original house probably had a single 120V drop for lighting. At some later point the house was "upgraded" to 240V to support the electric range. Then a variety of subpanels were added over the years as additional appliances were added. The back porch had an assortment of electrical boxes including a large EXPOSED knife switch, a small fuse panel, and a couple of small breaker panels. Wiring ran all over the wall in various forms including knob and tube extensions, metal conduit, cloth covered romex, and a piece of modern romex. A virtual museum of electrical technologies. :)

I posted some pictures of the old wiring on the back porch at:

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I'm happy to say this mess is all gone now that I have the new service installed.

The knob and tube wiring on the side of the house was the real surprise. Comes out of the wall in the attic, runs down the side of the house, and then back into the basement. The insulation was clearly not intended for outdoor use, as it has mostly crumbled and fallen away. A quick check with a meter and tracing the wires confirmed those outdoor wires carry the full power for every outlet in the living room and bedrooms. So I still have a fair amount of work to do before I can remove those wires from the side of the house.

Not an option. It's only 2" and on the outside of the house.

My thoughts exactly. Since they already have outlets in the baseboards, it would be nice to have the new outlet locations match the old ones.

No crown moulding in their house.

The knob and tube wiring is all surface mounted along beams in the basement and the tops of the ceiling joists in the attic. The only exception is where wires run up through the floor to an outlet.

I'm drilling holes for the new wiring and moving everything up into the joist bays. Though we have no plans to finish the basement ceiling, this would allow that and gives the wiring a bit more protection.

Thanks again!

Anthony

Reply to
HerHusband

You should check your updated NED for the code-approved height of new receptacles. Installing receptacles in old baseboard openings does not meet the new floor-to-receptacle requirement. You MAY be able to get some type of waiver but this would have to be issued by your local municipality. I redid a 3-story,

4-unit, 120 year old property. Thank goodness it was a balloon-framed structure. I was NOT permitted to re-use openings in baseboards. There are ways to install boxes in plaster and lathe so as to secure the un-keyed plaster. Best to find old studs and purchase old work boxes from Madison electric for the install. These plastic boxes are code-approved for drywall screws that are INSIDE the box and easily install to studs. Wall damage is therefore minimal. This way the box is secured on the stud and there is no worry about the Carlon old-work box 'wings' that do not usually hold up. Wire box before attaching to stud. Not approved for MC and MC installs are much more difficult but safer in narrower walls or homes with a lot of rodent activity.
Reply to
Doreen

espically since this topic is super old, dating back to 2006

i hope google never sells auto drive cars, since they will try to drive on non existent roads.

they should be ashamed at how bad the truly are

Reply to
bob haller

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