Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

AndrewDucker

Light switches are on when they're in the down position.

View on HN

> Light switches are on when they're in the down position.

This really depends on the part of the world you are living in.

When I was living in Central Europe the light switches were on when they were in the up position.

Edit: Even all my Canadian switches are like this. Up is on.

The UK and many ex-colonies that also maintain plug/outlet switches seem to generally use down for on, while the US/Canada/Central Europe often use up for on.

Especially annoying are the posh toggles, unnecessarily popular in some European countries (e.g. CH) that don’t have any physical indicator of on-off status.

The lack of any affordance whatsoever on buttons, switches and appliances in Switzerland drives me absolutely insane

This becomes confounded if you have multiple switches for the same light though.

Maybe they should be installed sideways.

Here in USA, single-gang switches have "on" and "off" embossed on the switch, so the state is shown based on the position (oriented up is on). Multi-gang switches have no embossing.

It’s fine for multi-way switches, and probably even better than confounded switches, but as I mentioned they’re unnecessarily common which in this case means that they’re often used (at least in some settings in CH) for single-switch setups as well. For instance, my apartment had around 8-10 push switches of this type, with only 1 that was a three-way switch.

And in other places (e.g. Japan), the switches are left/right. I think right is On.

Sometimes it can even be either way, because there are two switches and toggling one of them toggles the light in any case; they essentially act as a XOR circuit and are most commonly seen in corridors.

More like a not xor, since you typically need to have both in the same position, not in opposite positions.

Central europe here as well: We have light switches that are press to toggle and spring back in our home.

The apartment I live in has switches that turn the light on in its down position in some rooms and switches that turn the light of in its up position in other rooms. Fun!

You can fix it quite easily by pulling out the whole switch and setting it in the box the other way.

But by now I've gotten so used to it that I don't want to :)

Or when you cheaped out on workforce you could get some of them up, some of them down :D

And some not working at all.

Unless you have two switches for the same light so the on position depends on what position the other switch is in too

Both switches should be turned 90 degrees and move horizontally.

Hahaha yes!

Yup I've got some like these in the house here.

luckily all light switches have a light indicator show the current status.

Except when the bulb has gone. Which is the one time you really want to be sure the power is off.

In that case removing the broken bulb and sticking your fingers on the metal bits also works.

(A) What? Not.

Off: https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/light-switch-in-off-pos...

Also off: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Ro...

Unless you mean this kind that offer either way: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71BTb1oUUYS.jpg

(B) The standard three way* switch would like a word.

* Which actually means two switches (or more).

Yeah, I've lived with dual switches my whole life. Hallway in my childhood home, the two entrances to my kitchen now. Also my bathroom switch is left/right. I had no idea "up is on/off" was even a thing until someone referenced it a few years ago (in my 30s).

Y'all live on different continents. Their switches don't look like that. They look like this: https://youtu.be/uJeBKUVIRYo?t=371

It depends entirely on how they were mounted/wired and if the person doing it cared. Where I live the inconsistency is real, even inside a single home, though most people seem to not care. In my own home I fixed everything which was in the subjectively wrong position, it was trivial to do.

Yes. An electrician re-wiring my kitchen had three adjacent switches differently up / down when all off. He happily redid them when asked, but clearly himself didn't care about the consistency.

The analogous case being a horizontal circuit laying on a table with the crossbar switch up in the air causing an open circuit & being down closing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com