During our family summer vacation, we found ourselves unable to get the stovetop in our London apartment to work. The oven worked, but not the stovetop (known as a “hob” in England).
The property management company did leave the instructions for all of the appliances, and we found the instructions for the stovetop in what seemed like every European language except English.¹ I pulled out the German instructions, followed the steps, but the stovetop still didn’t work.
One of my friends replied to my online appeal for help: Look around the kitchen for a switch that doesn’t seem to do anything. That switch may very well control the stovetop.
Note that the switch may be nowhere near the stove.
I found an overlooked switch in the corner of the room. I turned it on. The stovetop started working.
Bonus chatter: The previous tenant appeared to be a vampire,² because many of the lamps had been rendered inoperative in various ways.
England appears to be partial to switched wall outlets, so trying to get a lamp to work involved trying out all eight combinations of
- the switch on the lamp itself,
- the switch on the outlet which controls the lamp, and
- the switch on the wall which controls the outlet.
There were two lamps which resisted even this brute-force algorithm.
One of them I never figured out. Maybe the bulb was burnt out, or the lamp was defective. Fortunately, there was more than enough light from the other lamps in the room that the loss of that corner lamp was not significant.
The second troublesome lamp didn’t work because it had been unplugged. The mystery is that there appeared to be no outlet nearby for it ever to have been plugged into! The only nearby outlet took a BS 546 plug (round prongs), but the lamp plug was a BS 1363 (rectangular prongs).
Bonus chatter 2: In addition to driving on the opposite side of the road compared to the United States, England’s switches are also the opposite of the United States. In England, down is on, and up is off.
In response to my confusion, a British colleague explained that it should have been obvious, because when the switch is in the on position, a little red light turns on.
Ah, but that’s the problem: It was a red light. Does a red light mean “Stop! Don’t use this outlet! (But I’m a light so you know that it’s working.)” Or does a red light mean “Look, I have power!”³
It depends on which you consider to be more important: The fact that it’s red, or the fact that it’s a light.
Bonus chatter 3: A different friend confessed that she had been living in Ireland for six years before discovering that the stovetop be shut off from a wall switch.
¹ I later found the English instructions in a different cabinet.
² More likely, the previous tenant couldn’t figure out how to turn off the lights, so they just unplugged everything in sight.
³ I have the same problem with car door locks. Does switching to red mean “Be careful! This door is locked!”? Or does it mean “Be careful! This door is unlocked!”?
The switch; so simple in purpose, yet so confusing in function. In the traditional toggle switch; lever arm is UP, switch is ON. Go back in time to the old two pole, push-button switch; top button pushed IN (ie: flat), switch is ON. The rocker switch (toggle vs rocker) behaves similarly; top pushed IN (ie: flat), switch is ON. Problem is, aesthetically it makes the bottom stick out, as if it were a low profile toggle, “pointing downwards”, which you’d think is OFF. What about a dimmer/slider switch ? Up is clearly ON, which would be the same if a toggle switch were ON. The main safety/usability point is you can turn them all OFF with a downward motion and ON with an upward motion. That works even if you are blind or in the dark. I’m sure there’s some light/sky/up, dark/earth/ground/down/safe parallelism.
What about the indicator light? Is it red or green? Isn’t red the indicator of “danger”, or “hot”? If the red light is on, does it mean outlet has power and it’s not safe? On my car door-lock, the red indicator shows when it’s unlocked. That’s only unsafe if the car is standing still and I don’t want it broken into. In an emergency, would you see red and think that’s locked, I must unlock to get out? What if the same light swtitch indicator is green on a different manufacturer’s switch? Does that mean it’s safe and the outlet is off or it has power and is OK to use? What if the indicator is on a light-switch, not an outlet, and it is ON when the light is OFF, so you can find the switch in the dark?
No wonder people get all confused. If I came across this Switch Skeuomorph, I’d be really confused ans assuming I spoke English would have preferred this one, though I’d say they are mounted upside down in both cases. Also, if need to explain your implementation, then your design is probably flawed.
I have never seen a switch on a wall that controls an outlet, that is not normal for the UK.
When it’s dark and you don’t know where the switch is, it’s easier to run your fingers down the wall looking for the switch to turn it on.
US switches are more effort.
Light switches in my flat were quite random in regarding the direction they turned on – I fixed this a few years ago when I replaced them all (of course, since I have several lights that are controlled by 2 or 3 switches, those are still random because any of them will toggle the light).
Interesting – I don’t recall ever seeing a wall switch which controlled an outlet in the UK, except in stage lighting setups where all the lights are controlled from up in the lighting room. (I was in London most of the summer too, I’m in the US now, and have adjusted to most differences – but having an outlet controlled by a light switch still seems quite bizarre.) We used the round pin sockets for stage lighting quite a lot, as a way of avoiding people plugging power tools or other equipment into a lighting circuit which (a) might well have a dimmer controlling it (very bad both for most tools and for the dimmer circuit itself) and (b) could inconvenience the user when their tool gets 20 V instead of full mains voltage.
The red light seems obvious if you think about wanting it to be consistent in a power cut or if controlled by another switch upstream: light off = power off. The outlet switches usually, but not always, have a little red patch on the top which is visible only when the switch is “on”. (Though my mother’s house has a light over the stairs controlled by 3 switches, so changing a blown bulb tends to carry a 50-50 chance of being much closer than I’d like to a 240 V supply.)
I was completely unaware that it wasn’t standard globally for all switches to be down for on as it is here in the UK. Our house is a bit of an exception though, as some work was done by a not completely legitimate electrician, so some of our light switches have been reversed. We’ve got three switches in a row in our living room done by this electrician, two of which are down for on, and one is up (or it might be the other way round – I can never remember). The upshot of this is that even after living here for over 10 years, it still takes several attempts to get the desired lights on.
Maybe this is partly why computer UIs have switches as horizontal rather than vertical – so that there’ll be no confusion as to which means on.
The convention of down=off really applies only to two-way switches. In the US, on old-style two-way switches (not the decora (TM) ones), you’ll see ON and OFF written on the switch body (decora ones may have ON/OFF written on the switch’s mounting plate, which is of course covered by the face plate. Those markings are only a guide to the installer not to the user). For three- or four-way switches, down=off does not always apply, because the powered state depends on the other switch(es) on the circuit. Many of the switches in my house are three-ways, and thus I have no innate memory of up=on, down=off.
I’ve also heard a story about the reason why for down=off. It was thought that if the switch contacts were degraded, of if the switch were in any way worn-out, gravity would pull the switch down into the off state, which is safer then pulling it into the on state.
I recently installed some horizontal switches in my house as an upgrade for a ceiling fan. I honestly couldn’t care at all whether left or right = on.
You can still find plenty of poor horizontal switch UIs on computers. Especially the ones labeled “On” or “Off”, and it’s not clear whether the labelling indicates the current state or the state that it will become if you toggle it.
Oh there will be. For example, do you flip them in right-to-left locales, so right means off and left means on?
[England’s switches are also the opposite of the United States. In England, down is on, and up is off.]
When I visit my relatives in Taiwan, I gave up seeing what position the switch is, because all lamps on corridors are “two way lamp switches”. (Depending on the state of the switch on the other end, up may be on, or off)
[The second troublesome lamp didn’t work because it had been unplugged. The mystery is that there appeared to be no outlet nearby for it ever to have been plugged into! The only nearby outlet took a BS 546 plug (round prongs), but the lamp plug was a BS 1363 (rectangular prongs).]
My guess would be you can find a BS 1363 to BS 546 adapter somewhere in a drawer near socket that is not in use, or socket near a table.
People will try to unplug an applicance that they’re not using to plug their hair dryer or so on if the socket type does not match, and then they found an adapter on wall. And when they finished with it, they put it inside a nearby drawer instead of putting it back where it should be, so in the second or third day they can get it easily.
In Australia, all wall sockets are required to be switched, and down is on. I’ve never seen a house with a switch that turns on the outlets that may be used for lamps here.
Red is a signal for “Danger! The circuit is live!” here. Red is commonly painted on the top of a switch to show this, and in fuse boxes when the breaker is on there is a patch of red paint, mostly with the word “on” or a “1” (with 0 being used for off). Ironically, breakers are up for on and down for off. Nothing like consistency.
In my house (in the US) there are two lights that have two switches (one at both ends of a hallway and one at both ends of a staircase). In both cases, the switches must point in the opposite direction from each other for the light to turn on. Not sure how common that is and why.
Here’s a fun one:
Upstairs you have a double switch
Downstairs you have a triple switch
The two upstairs switches are linked to two of the three downstairs switches in the == is off, != is on arangement
These switches control the lights in the hall (downstairs) and landing (upstairs)
What about the 3rd downstairs switch? Well that’s the light besides the front door of course!
That 3rd switch acts just like a normal switch
Your challenge: Turn on/off the correct light without giving the street a light show
Alternative challenge: Figure out if the light is on/off before attempting to change the lightbulb
>Morty, I need darkness to prime these optical inductors.Hit the leftmost light switch by the door for me. The left. Okay, lights on. So, did I just hear three distinct light switch clicks?
>W-W-What do you mean?
>I feel like the three sounds I heard could be explained by an initial erroneous flipping of a switch on the right followed by a hasty, corrective flipping of the requested switch. Then during the resultant darkness and silence, a third, shameful unflipping of the initially flipped switch. Is my assessment accurate?
>Yeah, that’s that’s basically how how it all shaked out.
The first challenge is simple: the light for the street will have “ON” and “OFF” molded into the switch lever, because it’s (probably) not a three-way switch. The second challenge is best met by just using a dry fiberglass ladder, changing the bulb with one hand, and not licking your finger before you stick it in the empty socket.
I don’t know if electricians wire three-way switches to be opposite or not on purpose; I suspect it’s random. If you take one switch out of the wall (after ensuring power is off to that circuit &c) and find that it connected to white, black, green/bare, and red, you should be able to swap the red and white to make both switch point the same direction for on, opposite for off.
It’s even easier than swapping wires: just flip the switch over and reinstall. 3-way switches never have the “OFF” and “ON” legends molded into the switch, since it’d be useless, so they’re perfectly symmetrical. That’s also how you can tell that “up is on” is the standard: if a typical SPST switch is installed so that down is on, the molded-in legends read “NO” and “ℲℲO”.
Can you not just take one of the three-way switches and flip it upside-down?
This is a serious question, I have replaced a “normal” switch before but that’s the extent of my experience. I’ve been slightly annoyed by a pair of switches where “opposite means off” doing this in my house and have been meaning to get around to flipping one upside down but just haven’t bothered yet, and it hadn’t occurred to me until reading your comment that it might be more complicated than flipping it around. Do switches have a standard “up”, or is there some need for all the switches in a panel to all be oriented the same way, such that it takes rewiring to get this fixed?
Don’t even start with me on the on/off up/down issue.
Since early childhood, I am used to this convention: on = stick pointing up or top edge or button pressed in; off = stick pointing down or bottom edge or button pressed in. When I was seven years old, we moved to a new apartment. My father got up the ladder to install the lighting fixture after turning the switches down. There were sparks and possibly a bad word or two. (No casualties or damage, luckily.)
Now that I am a grown man and have directed two renovations of my own, I finally managed to get all switches in my apartment in the correct orientation. Ironically, my plumbers installed the water pipes backwards — in the one faucet that connects directly to the wall pipes, lever to the right turns on hot water rather than cold. I had to have all the other (hose-connected) faucets reversed because consistency trumps correctness.
I have also seen light switches with a red LED that glows when light is off. The explanation I have heard is that the LED helps you find the switch in the darkness. (And if that’s true, then it’s natural for it to be red because that is easier on the eyes at night.)