My outlet is on two circuits at once...

[vincenti42]

I have an ancient home with knob and tube wiring, and a breaker box from the 70s. It's all a mess, with circuits powering random things on opposite ends of the house. The breaker box has breakers with multiple wires spliced or coming out of the stud and all the neutral studs are overloaded with wires. Yes I would update this if I could afford it but until then I have one thing in particular that I cannot understand:

I went to update an outlet in my bedroom and I found that it is receiving power from TWO breakers - and I don't mean one per plug with the tabs broken off. I mean when I just off breaker 9, one wire is hot, and when I shut off breaker 11 the other wire is hot (note: these breakers are next to each other like a 220 situation but they are separate, 110V, 15A breakers). So far my phone charger works on this outlet. I've tried a lamp for only about a minute and it worked fine. Is this basically an accidental 220V set up? How could they have wired these circuits to work this way? Is this very dangerous? It must have been like this for decades by now.

P.S. there's no ground wire to speak of.

 

[Megawatt]

I have an ancient home with knob and tube wiring, and a breaker box from the 70s. It's all a mess, with circuits powering random things on opposite ends of the house. The breaker box has breakers with multiple wires spliced or coming out of the stud and all the neutral studs are overloaded with wires. Yes I would update this if I could afford it but until then I have one thing in particular that I cannot understand:

I went to update an outlet in my bedroom and I found that it is receiving power from TWO breakers - and I don't mean one per plug with the tabs broken off. I mean when I just off breaker 9, one wire is hot, and when I shut off breaker 11 the other wire is hot (note: these breakers are next to each other like a 220 situation but they are separate, 110V, 15A breakers). So far my phone charger works on this outlet. I've tried a lamp for only about a minute and it worked fine. Is this basically an accidental 220V set up? How could they have wired these circuits to work this way? Is this very dangerous? It must have been like this for decades by now.

P.S. there's no ground wire to speak of.

I’m sorry to hear that you have knob and tubing wire but if the bracket is not broken on the receptacle then I really don’t see how it could work with 2 different breakers. It is possible that the 2 breakers are on the same phase if that makes any sense. Turn the number 9 breaker off and check and see if the receptacle is still working or turn off number 11, either way it should work regardless of which breaker you turn off. Good luck my friend and welcome to the forum