I think that the point here is that your house's infrastructure was in poor
condition and as such it's in danger of fire, flood etc. Age alone does not
make wiring bad or dangerous. A house built in 23' could have wiring types
other than K&T, which in a poorly kept house, could deteriorate as badly or
worse than the K&T. In fact, in the book " Old Electrical Wiring" by David
Shapiro, he writes there is evidence that K&T was used in the 1980's in New
Orleans, in areas that flooded frequently, specifically because it held up
under those conditions.



"Rick F." wrote in message
...
On 2007-03-05, RBM wrote:
I'm sure insurance companies base their concern in part by statistical
information regarding old wiring. The problem with K&T is that it's
easily
recognized as "old wiring" with little to determine its actual age, which
dates anywhere from the late 1800's into the 1960's and in rare instances
later. Rather then judge its present condition, it's easier to condemn
it,
as many people do largely out of ignorance. Armor cable of various types
has been in use from just before 1900 and a variety of non metallic
cables
not long after that, neither seems to rate the same negative attention
paid
to K&T, which I'd attribute to the general inability to distinguish its
age.
Today, we use a grounded electrical system, and as none of these old
wiring
methods had grounds or at least adequate ones, IMO, it would make sense
to
install new wiring as the opportunity arose

We have a rental property we bought back in '94 that was built in 1923
give or
take and it came to us with nothing but K&T wiring and a whole host of
other
more serious problems such as really bad & leaking roof, plumbing that was
leaking on both the hot-n-cold and sewer.. Anyway, we had to get hazard
(big
$$) insurance since nobody would otherwise give us a policy.. We quickly
found
that the majority of the house had been wired into a SINGLE K&T circuit
and
that had I fired up a larger sized microwave oven we probably would have
started charring wires in the attic.. We ended up re-doing the entire
wiring
system and ditched all of it -- it was a major hack job! Once we faxed a
copy
of the county inspectors closed-out permit showing replaced plumbing,
electric,
etc -- we were able to get a good (and cheap) insurance policy that was
10x
cheaper than the hazard variety.

YMMV!