It is as well to err on the side of extravagance in the number of wall plugs. When the floor-boards are up it is not a very costly matter to have them put in, and then when the furniture of a room is altered from the position originally assigned to it, as is so often done with a new house, it will not be found that the writing-table or sofa is on the opposite side of the room to the plug to which the lamp required to light it is attached.
The placing of the lights and the careful use of them would do much to lessen the bill for current—a fact proved to me when we let our house one winter to a family of the same size, who used the same number of rooms as we had used. The bill for light was sent in to us, and thus we discovered that it was just double what ours had been for the same quarter the year before.
I put this down to the fact that basement and passage lights must have been burned when not needed, and that instead of using one or two table lamps when reading and writing in the evening all the wall lights were lighted.
To Avoid Waste of Current.
The staircase lights should be on two-way switches, so that they can be controlled from each floor—that is to say, from the hall you can switch on the hall and first-floor lights. From the first floor you can switch off the hall and light the second floor, and so on up the house, the reverse process taking place in descending. If the lights are installed in this way it is not necessary to keep all the staircase lights burning, as is done in so many houses; the extra cost of installing is trifling.
In bedrooms where there are two or three lights in addition to a table-lamp at the side of the bed it is advisable and convenient to have at least one of the lights in a two-way switch.
As regards the candle-power of the various lamps, so much depends on the size and decoration of the room and the individual tastes of the occupiers as regards the standard of illumination that it is impossible to give any useful guide on this subject. Naturally the lowest available candle-power lamps will be fitted in passages, bathrooms, bedroom table-lamps, etc., but the smallest wire-drawn filament lamps will in many cases be found to be more than is necessary. Owing to the construction of these lamps, they have so far not been made lower than 16 candle-power for 200 volts, which is a common pressure in towns, but to compensate for this it must be borne in mind that a 25 c.p. metal filament lamp consumes about the same current as an 8 c.p. carbon filament lamp, and it is undoubtedly only a question of time before lamps of smaller candle-power and taking less current are put on the market.
PLATE XLII
