Luckily being from the middle ages the armour acts a faraday cage.
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Christ on a pogo stick, yes. POTS lines put out a shocking (sorry) amount on power when ringing. Supposedly is around 50VDC but Iāve measured as high as 75. It is unlikely to kill you but it will hurt like a mofo.
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IKEA uses wood?
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Epic !
Donāt you know what particleboard is made of? Besides, thereās this.
That was genuinely good, sorry.
Iād still rather be paid to do it for someone else though.
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You do at my 108 year old house. Iām just grateful the knob and tube was yanked in the 1950ās. 
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I only know this from hearsay, and Iām not going to do the experimentā¦ but yeah, I doubt it could kill a healthy person, and probably wonāt even leave a mark. Youāll be really, really unhappy though!
Testify, sister. The knobs and tubes are still to be found here and there in my place, but none of itās still live. I use armor cable for old houses, because itās an easy way to add grounds to ungrounded circuits, and mice canāt eat it the way they do romex.
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The only reason I know it was ever there is because thereās one hunk of ceramic still attached to a joist in the basement.
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Iāve recently been looking into thisā¦ what is that process like? Everyone seems to say ābetter off adding new outlets instead.ā
At least itās not one of those āgood news/bad newsā situations. Good news: no knob and tube Bad news: aluminum wiring.
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Oh, yeah, we totally dodged a bullet on that one. 
Adding grounds is so site-dependent itās hard to give any generically useful advice. But Iāll try.
Make sure your breaker panel/fuse box ground is good, before you do anything else. Ours was not; the main ground was tied into a 150 year old water pipe, but the pipe between the steel well casing (awesome ground!) and the house had been replaced by plastic at some point, so there was no valid ground anywhere in the entire building. I drove a 10 foot copper rod and wired it directly to the panel, taking the plumbing out of the picture, at which point I found out that previous owners had used the plumbing as a ground distribution path, which is workable in a pinch though not really a great idea.
Then get one of these and check every outlet in the house. Usually doesnāt take long in an old house ;). Youāll probably find some reverse wired outlets to fix, too.
At this point you will be able to classify your outlets into ones that are fishable from the basement or attic, and ones that have mysterious wiring that travels through alternate dimensions unknown to man. Put GFCI outlets in the mysterious ones, and mark them with a label that says āno equipment groundā (the label is actually required by code). But donāt put them all in at once, because itās possible that GFCIs wonāt work (for reasons Iāll explain if you really want me toā¦) and basically, in some old wiring youāll turn on a light in the next room and the GFCI will pop. So replace the two-prong outlets one at a time with GFCI outlets and see if they work out for a week or so (they usually will, since you have no remaining knob & tube).
For the ones you can get new wiring to, evaluate the existing wiring. If itās tarred asbestos, gutta percha, or natural rubber itās best not to disturb it. That stuff is still great insulation, even though itās old and dried out, but only as long as it is not flexed very much. It will pop off in chunks if you mess about with it, leaving exposed wires which are a fire hazard.
If your insulation is plastic, heave a sigh of relief and see if you can just drag out the old and drag in the new. Since the wiringās not original itās unlikely to be stapled inside the walls where you canāt get it (although you canāt depend on that, either). If you have an electrician do it, tell him you want BX cable (mouseproof armored cable).
If your wire insulation is old dried up tarred cloth over gutta percha, you can use a fish tape (warning: not the easiest tool to use, guaranteed to improve your cussing expertise and/or make you cry) or old coat hangers or the like to fish a separate ground wire up from the basement or down from the attic. It doesnāt really have to be an insulated wire, but it should be green insulated and the same gauge as your neutral (white) wires or heavier.
If youāre good at plastering, just chop your way into the walls and fix it afterwards because thatās actually easier than fishing wires iff you have mad plastering skillz.
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Indeed, our cloth wrapped wires from the 50ās were, in fact, stapled. For the wider audience, these are nothing like paper staples. About an inch long, and the pokey parts are just shy of that.
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Some previous owner of my house didnāt want to rewire most of the outlets to include a ground back to the main panel. So he drove in a bunch of ground rods on the far side of the house and in the crawl space. He then ran a grounding wire from some (!) of the outlets to the ground rods. It sorta works, but itās not to code. He also replaced ALL the outlets in the house with modern grounded outlets, whether the circuit was grounded or not. Oh, and he daisy-chained a bunch of GFCI outlets so there were three GFCIs on the same circuit. Iāve been here ten years and Iām still finding weird stuff he did.
Shall I tell you how he tried to fix a cracked stem wall with putty? Yeah, putty. Like on old windows. Fixing it right with structural epoxy wasnāt half as hard as getting the putty out of the crack and cleaning it up so the epoxy would stick.
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I use a plug-in surge suppressor with 6 AC outlets and 2 USB ports. Itās fantastic. Belkin I think.
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Thereās some pretty good reasons the code only allows one ground point. That guy was dangerously incompetent! But if you run a thick (like, six or four gauge) wire between all the ground rods itāll count as one ground point and be legal.
My house has also had owners of wildly varying ability over time. You look at some of the work with aweā¦ sometimes 'cause itās so good, and sometimes because you canāt fathom the level of self-deluding incompetence involved.
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Iām grateful everyone resisted the jokes you could make about this sentence.
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Shame on you for resisting! Folks around here love terrible sex jokes. Especially dick jokes.
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You should see the plumbing at my placeā¦ holy hobbyist! (says the hobbyist)
But for real, as someone who does inspectionsā¦ there is a saying. āWiring is not a hobbyā
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