The Master has already covered driving on the left vs. driving on the right. Now I’m curious about why the ‘on’ position of light switches varies from country to country. From what I’ve seen on TV, light switches in the US are ‘on’ if they are switched up. Here in New Zealand, they’re ‘on’ if they are down. I might be wrong, but I believe it’s the same in Australia (I didn’t notice anything about light switches the one time I’ve been in Oz, and I probably would have if they were different).
I would like to know two things:
Firstly, what is the ‘on’ position in other countries? Is it a British Commonwealth vs the rest of the world thing? Or something completely different?
Secondly, why? Cecil gave a perfectly logical reason for the side-of-the-road question (which, before I read that column. I had written off as an unsolvable mystery). Now I want to push my luck for a logical reason for light switch positions.
As Tengu mentioned, ON = ‘up’ in Canada. This is the usual way for a vertically-mounted switch, and the reason is safety: if something should fall across the switch and change its state, it will turn the power off rather than on. The exception is when it’s safer to accidentally turn the power on rather than off, but I’m not sure how often that would occur in residential environments.
If its miswired. Instead of saying “on,” It says “no.” I’ve inturpreted that to be an editorial statement. As in “No, you dumb s***, it goes the other way!” :smack:
In my experience, most houses have enough two way switches to make it unlikely that you can expect a particular switch to work in a particular direction anyway.
I expect we’ll have the usual confuction over rocker/toggle switches any moment now, as they can appear, at first glance, to operate in different ways, but if you look at it like this, a toggle switch can be thought of as just a rocker switch with a rod sticking out.
In the case of the UK, the ‘down’ position (Figures B and D) is the standard ‘on’ position. In the case of appliances controlled by more than one switch, there is no hard-and-fast ‘on’ position because the switch positions are all interdependent.
I have come across a great idea used in France regarding lights controlled by more than one switch . This is a push button which controls a relay wired to the light. Several buttons can be connected to this relay . You just push the button , you get a “clunk” from the relay ( located in the fuse box) and the light turns on or off. I would have thought that this system makes wiring simpler and you can have as many switches as you want controlling the one light.
Sounds diabolicaly easy. The only problem would be when the relay contacts weld themselves shut eventually, but they are usually good for god knows how many operations, makes you wonder why they haven’t been adopted more widely.
There was a proposal here for a similar system where to push buttons, or even touch controls, were to be LV and the relay operate the mains voltage circuitry, to improve electrical safety.
Don’t see any evidence of it being adopted anywhere though.
You can do this now. In between the two double throw switches add as many double pole-double throw switches as desired that are internally wired to interchange the two lines and voila! you have it. Such switches are commercially available and are used all the time.
At one of the offices I visit, the lights are controlled from two different locations (one by each entry door) on a bank of four toggle-style switches that are always in the ‘up’ position; pressing them down toggles the respective strip of lights and the switch springs back to the ‘up’ position.
There have been threads about this before, and in at least one of them, the discussion sailed along nicely until somebody said, “but what do you even mean by ‘up’ and ‘down’? When you throw a modern switch down, the top part sticks out, which is kinda up, innit? But an old fashioned toggle one will look down”
So I think in terms of the direction your finger moves. In Australia, I move my finger down across the switch to turn a light on.
