Over the years most of the power in the downstairs of our house has been upgraded but in the case of the piano / sun room it was only updated as far as the basement. Below each of the outlets there was a junction box where the new basement wire was spliced into old knob and tube. We decided that plugging the treadmill into an outlet wired about 40 years before the modern treadmill was invented perhaps, was not the best idea. So Chris and I took a Saturday morning and pulled new wire for the north side outlet for the treadmill leaving the South side outlet untouched, figuring the only thing we might ever plug into it was a small fan, and the wiring should be able to handle that no problem.
Well a few months back it started to get a little warm when running out there so I decided to go ahead and plug a fan in. Immediately I run into a snag, the outlet is not polarized and the fan is. So I ran down to the basement where I have a grounding adapter figuring, without looking twice that this will take care of the problem, only to discover that that adapter is also polarized. At that point I decided to just throw in the towel and use one of the living room outlets. The closest outlet was thankfully polarized but the cord for the fan was too short and the only extension cord I could find was grounded. So I ended up using the living room outlet with both the grounding adapter and the extension cord.
I had a day off last week so I decided the tackle the sun room outlet so I could just plug in the damned fan already. I figured Chris and I were able to wire up the north outlet together in an hour, me doing the south outlet alone couldn't possibly take more than 2 hours. Four hours later I had some nice road rash going on my right arm and had various cuts and scratches all over, and all I had to show for it is the complete and total removal of the original wires, the ones I had planned to use to pull through the new wiring. At this point I took the only option left to me which was to remove the original electrical box and knock a larger hole so I could fish the new wire down into the basement.
Here is the original outlet, we had 2 of these in the house when we moved in according to Wikipedia this is is a "parallel and tandem outlet" rated at 250 v 10 A and can handle either a NEMA 1-15 or 2-15 plug. The 2-15 standard hasn't been used since the 60's so this must be quite a bit older than that.
Here is the original electrical box. This puppy was really in there, the cleat you can see on the right was nailed into the stud while the metal tabs on the left hand side had lath sandwiched between them.
And all told here is the damage I'm still trying to figure out of if the house or I got the worst of it.
At any rate by Sunday night I was able to get the whole patched up and the outlet installed. The wallpaper was a casually but fortunately the long sheers the previous owner left us seem to cover the area nicely.
