Nothing too special about the orange ones, but the black ones are interesting because A, they're black, and B, they're rated for aluminum and copper wire! They're rated for Copper-copper connections, aluminum-aluminum connections, and (in dry locations only) are also rated for copper-aluminum/aluminum-copper installations.
Yeah beware with aluminum...some decices are not compatible with it! Aluminum has a higher resistance than copper, so the next guage up should be used (like with #12, it should be #10). But since that often wasn't done, isssues could result where wires are joined together or attach to a receptacle, etc. as those are often the first thing to overheat in the event of an overload.
A commom "fix" for the aluminum wire problem is a practice called "pigtailing" where you use copper wire to connect a receptacle, light switch, etc. and then join that to aluminum with compatible wirenuts. I'm not sure what codes say about this and I think it's just one more thing to overheat but that's just me. The black-jacketed wire in your aunt/uncle's basement the preheaters are hooked up to might be aluminum since that's a 60s-70s installation, when it was common to use aluminum.
I think you're right about my aunt's and uncle's basement wiring. the whole basement is being rewire though. The upstairs has already been rewired since they had an electrician rewire the upstairs while they had the walls opened up. They didn't have drywall upstairs. They had furring strips with plaster and horsehair instead. They redid the upstairs bathroom with drywall. Not sure about the rest of the house but a lot of the wiring is being redone. The kitchen light fixture was relocated (they installed an island, which is a permanent table-like countertop with cupboards on one side and stools on the other) because they wanted the light fixture centered over the island. The fixture was in a weird location anyway, since the kitchen was expanded at one point so it wasn't actually centered in the room anymore. They also converted part of the dining room into a little bathroom (well there already was a bathroom, but it was only a toilet, no sink, and instead of a door it had a shower curtain. They expanded the bathroom, added a sink, and added a door).
The bedrooms (upstairs) were done first, so they could actually move into the house. They were definitely repainted but not sure if they were redrywalled. I think the windows were already upgraded to energy-efficient windows, so they didn't need to do that. The living room had already been remodeled when they moved in, so until they got the upstairs bedrooms redone, that's where they slept. The old owners had all fairly recent appliances too, so those stayed. The basement is a total disaster scene though. Wires not stapled to the ceiling (they're litterally just strung across the basement), splices not in boxes, switches that control nothing, random sections of wire that were determined to no longer be hooked up, poor lighting (there's I think four or five incandescents, wired up with the classic method of the one near the basement door being on a switch upstairs and the others being pull-chains) and the only fluorescent lights that lit up when they moved in were the one I had that had a ballast EOL and the one Aaron was going to get (which is the twin to the one I traded with Joe) and the fluorescents had random lamps removed. The one that had an EOL ballast after I got it had one lamp that worked and one that kepts making the lamp blink.
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A commom "fix" for the aluminum wire problem is a practice called "pigtailing" where you use copper wire to connect a receptacle, light switch, etc. and then join that to aluminum with compatible wirenuts. I'm not sure what codes say about this and I think it's just one more thing to overheat but that's just me. The black-jacketed wire in your aunt/uncle's basement the preheaters are hooked up to might be aluminum since that's a 60s-70s installation, when it was common to use aluminum.
The bedrooms (upstairs) were done first, so they could actually move into the house. They were definitely repainted but not sure if they were redrywalled. I think the windows were already upgraded to energy-efficient windows, so they didn't need to do that. The living room had already been remodeled when they moved in, so until they got the upstairs bedrooms redone, that's where they slept. The old owners had all fairly recent appliances too, so those stayed. The basement is a total disaster scene though. Wires not stapled to the ceiling (they're litterally just strung across the basement), splices not in boxes, switches that control nothing, random sections of wire that were determined to no longer be hooked up, poor lighting (there's I think four or five incandescents, wired up with the classic method of the one near the basement door being on a switch upstairs and the others being pull-chains) and the only fluorescent lights that lit up when they moved in were the one I had that had a ballast EOL and the one Aaron was going to get (which is the twin to the one I traded with Joe) and the fluorescents had random lamps removed. The one that had an EOL ballast after I got it had one lamp that worked and one that kepts making the lamp blink.