old wiring or not?

[kreyszig]

sorry no pictures with this one yet! (EDIT: pictures now in! see a few posts in)
I noticed a loose section of floorboard yesterday in our bedroom - it was a section about a foot long that had been cut out by one of the previous owners and was sitting right above the light in the room downstairs. I pulled it up as it wasn't fastened in any way! There's modern grey twin and earth cabling running to the light beneath via a junction box right in that spot, nothing too exciting. In the same void however there are several thin wires, about 5 or 6 from memory. They are not grouped in any way other than being held to one of the joists at two spots with a thin piece of wood nailed to the joist.

They are only about 1mm in diameter, I am wondering whether they are just old electrical cables, or possibly from a bell pull system? I don't really think our place is grand enough for bells (late victorian/edwardian 4 bed semi), but the cables seem a lot thinner than any of the old wiring I can see on t'internet. From what I can see they are going from one end of the room to the other, and I can't see any pulleys anywhere. Whatever they are covered in doesn't seem to be woven, and by the stiffness of them I'd guess they are not stranded internally either.

any ideas?

 

[Flyfisher]

I think photos would be a definite help in this case. We have thin single cables snaking around our floor and attic voids but they are definitely multistranded electrical cables and, I think, almost certainly associated with the 'servant annunciator' gizmo we have in the old kitchen plus the bell pushes in most of the rooms. We also had a fair bit of old telephone cabling, though that was also multistranded.

After making sure there was no voltage across any of these wires, I just left them in place. The old telephone cables were disconnected when new master sockets were installed by BT.

 

[kreyszig]

Yeah it was a bit of a long shot without pictures, I'll take some tonight and post them up.

 

[plasticpigeon]

Your house could easily have accomodated a maid of some sort,I've been in a house near me much more humble than yours wityh a servants annunciator

 

[parkview094]

Old wiring would be my guess without seeing a picture. Under floorboards I've found miles of the stuff in our house that sounds exactly as you describe, only ours is run in neat wooden channels. Looks to be covered in some form of braiding, but has gone stiff over the years.. Seems to be 2x single core cables?

quick google - this is what we have. Is this similar?

 

[bennoa1]

Are they white? Could be alarm cables? Or old telephone cabling.

 

[MatthewC]

<smug mode>
I am so glad that, before I had my house re-wired, I had the mains in my house isolated so that I could pull/cut out every cable I saw, knowing that it was not live!
</smug mode>

And there were some horrors as well as mysteries like the one above. The trouble is that I have created a mystery myself as there is a new switch on my kitchen wall that does nothing and we cannot remember why this is so...

 

[kreyszig]

Here's some pictures (quite big, sorry):

pretty sure the mouse poo is not recent!

 

[d49xc]

I'll go with @Flyfisher's suggestion.
It looks like servant's call bell low voltage electric cabling to me as well.

 

[fernicarry]

Those pictures could have been taken under our floors, absolutely identical in every detail!

I have found quite a lot of the same lightweight braided cable in the loft, some white but mostly red and black. I assumed it must have been for a lighting circuit but now that I think about it some of it followed the same route as the remnants of an old mechanical bell system (stiff wire and cranks) so may indeed have been an electrical upgrade of that. Sadly the business end in the kitchen is long gone but next door still have theirs. Nowadays we have a small linux server running an asterisk IP phone system with which to communicate requests to the kitchen....

Census results may shed some light on whether your house ever had live-in staff. In 1901 our's had two people listed with occupations of nurse and general servant in addition to the owner his wife and 6 children!

-Alan

 

[kreyszig]

good stuff people, thank you. Sounds like a bell system isn't impossible. Good idea on the census, sadly we are yet to find the house - the road names have changed around here as far as I can tell. We can see the people that eventually moved in, no servant back when we first see them but they were in a small terrace too.
A relative mentioned that day servants were a possibility too, even if they didn't live in they would still use a bell type system I guess.