NM cable (Romex) was recognized in the 1926 NEC



"Husky" wrote in message
news
mm wrote:
On Fri, 8 Dec 2006 20:28:30 -0600, "Steve Barker LT"
wrote:


can't speak for the BX, but the old cloth romex I'm pulling out of my


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...