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I have some friends who own a century-old house, and for the past five years I've been helping them remodel the place from top to bottom. When the wall and ceiling plaster was removed, we took the time to replace the old knob-and-tube wiring. Many years ago (the 1950's or early 60's) the house had been divided into two apartments, and the wiring was partially updated at that time. A subsidiary electrical panel (commonly called a sub-panel) was installed on the second-floor to service the upstairs apartment. This remote breaker box was fed with a 6-3 cable (that's 3 conductors, each a Number 6 size) with no ground wire. The sub-panel had been installed in an old attic, but the attic had been converted to a bedroom. The room had no closet, and the previous homeowner installed closet rods above the sub-panel, so the panel was blocked by hanging clothes. The National Electrical Code requires a 3' x 3' clear area in front of a panel, so this arrangement was a code violation, albeit a minor one. We decided to solve several problems by simply replacing the old sub-panel with a new sub-panel of the same capacity, and then re-wiring all of the existing circuits. The new sub-panel would be located in a hallway instead of a bedroom. Perhaps the trickiest part of installing a new sub-panel in an old house is running the sub-feed cable from the main panel to the sub-panel. Since we had stripped the ceiling and walls below, we were able to easily run a new 6-3G cable from the basement...

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