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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

In all of the houses I've lived in here in the USA, its worse. Electricians literally don't care what order the switches are wired. The just grab wires and start adding switches. This results in the switch for the light you want to use often being farthest from the light on the panel. Mostly, its just random. It usually dives me nuts until I reorder them.

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My very first "improvement" in my new house was "fixing" the order of light switches (before I had even moved into the house), so that they had some logical relationship to the physical layout of the space.

It's even worse when they put enough lights on a circuit that the first person to turn on a hair dryer without shutting most of them off blows the circuit breaker.

That's just incorrect wiring from my point of view; I don't know the US regulations, but you shouldn't mix lights and power sockets on the same circuit. Lights should have their own circuit breaker, of less amps than a socket circuit.

I agree, but to my knowledge it's fully legal in most areas. I'm thankful I caught them putting my office on the same circuit and fixed it. One of my printers alone draws 13 amps while printing. I just wish I would've looked into the rest of the house when I found the office wiring.

Wait what? What kind of printer do you have?

Probably one of those Xerox documentcenters. Printing is sort of a misnomer as it can also bind, staple, fold, envelope, sort and duplex.

When I used to work in prepress the printer we had was as long as a truck, used 480V, and had it's own fume hood to capture all the ozone it put out.

If you had a known 13A load, why didn't you have a dedicated 15A branch circuit installed for it? Its uncommon but not prohibited in residential construction.

In the US, both the trade and the National Electric Code have a distinct preference to laying out branch circuits by room as much as possible. I lean towards that view as well, as it is a better logical organization for servicing and means you do not need to cut the lighting to half the house to work on a fixture.

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