[jyl]

Originally Posted by Tidybuoy

I am not an electrician, but I would think that sharing a ground would be ok. In a normal, modern electrical box, all of the circuits use the same ground bar.

I too have an old house that I just acquired. I have noticed that many of my electrical receptacles have a separate ground wire that is attached to a plumbing pipe. This is where the original wiring is knob and tube with no separate ground. I will slowly replace a lot of the wiring with romex as I have access to the main floor electrical from the basement and so this project won't be too difficult. The upstairs will be another issue.

Upstairs, running NM cable under the baseboards and receptacle boxes mounted behind openings in the baseboards makes it easy to wire outlets around a room - you just have to find one central place where you can run a bunch of NM cable up from basement to second floor - like a stairwell or something - and then from that central place run one cable to the nearest corner of each upstairs room. If baseboards are too small, well tall baseboards look better anyway. Don't go fishing cable through walls, any more than you have to. Abandon the old wiring in the walls. Get all new NM cable and all tied to the panel ground.