this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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My house was built in the 1960s and had a switch like this. I was always curious what the switch was actually doing. One day, I was replacing all the light switches with smart switches, and discovered that the switch didn't even had a load connected to it! It was literally doing nothing.
I was perplexed by this until I saw some old photos of the house, from the early 2010s when the previous owners bought it. It turned out that there were originally ceiling lights in the room (George Nelson bubble lamps, fitting the mid-century modern design of the house) that were removed at some point, and the switch was left behind. I had an electrician install recessed lights in most rooms, and they found old wires for the old lights. It wasn't actually proper power cabling though... They had used speaker cables to power the lights!
I used to work summers as an apprentice electrician. The amount of crazy wiring I saw in old houses was (heh) shocking. Sometimes it was just that it was old. Real old houses sometimes just had bare wire wrapped in silk. ... And a few decades later that silk was frayed and crumbling in the walls and needed replacing.
My current house was wired at a time when copper was more precious, so it was wired up and down through the house, with circuits arranged by proximity, not necessarily logic. When a certain circuit in my house blows the breaker, my TV, PC and one wall of the master bedroom all lose power. The TV and PC are not in the same room either.
in the 80s I helped gut a house that had aluminum wire with paper thin cloth wrapping. anywhere you touched it it would just disintegrate. blew my mind that the place hadn't burned to the ground, especially all the dead rodents that had nested in the piles of fragmented cloth wrap.