"WW" wrote in message
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"J Burns" wrote in message
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I've seen old houses where all circuits enter the breaker box as cables,
but some rooms still have knob-and-tube wiring. (A homeowner who needed
to upgrade wiring for his kitchen may have found the old wiring adequate
in a bedroom.)

That leads to a question that didn't occur to me before. Was there a
proper way to connect K & T to a cable?

When I was 12 years old we lived in an old (1900) house. It had K & T
wiring and screw fuses. One day a damper motor on the furnace overheated
and set the ceiling on fire. I called fire department. Parents were both
at work trying to exist in the depression. Fire Chief asked where the fuse
box was. I showed him and which fuse was on that circuit. He said here is
the problem, there is a 15 amp fuse and it should have been a 30 amp.
Hello... I knew better than that. Later years I worked on trouble shooting
for a utility company. Had a call on an old house that dining room light
would not work. Found screw fuse bad. Replaced fuse to check and it blew.
The owner said the room had just been painted and painter remove the
overhead fixture but he replaced it when paint was dry. I pulled the
fixture and found all 4 wires, hot and ground twisted together with one
wire nut. Corrected that. On fuse panels on all calls I always removed all
fuses to check for any arching on center contact. On this house one fuse
had an Indian head penny under it. Lucky it was not the circuit that the
fixture was on. Who knows how long that had been there. WW
The 30 amp fuse on the 15 amp circuit, and the penny under the fuse, may not
have been exactly improper. Those old panels had fuses on the neutrals,
which can be very dangerous. Ultimately those fuses were replaced with solid
brass fuse plugs, but I'm sure penny's worked just as well.