Bayonet light socket adapter

[David W.E. Roberts]

Hi,

those more senior DIYers will no doubt remeber the good old days when you could buy adapters for almost any electrical socket.

I remeber 'Y' adapters which you could plug into a light socket. This gave you a light and a power take off (with an appropriate bayonet plug to fit into the other socket).

Probably fell out of use from people connecting electric fires to the lighting circuit.

However it is an ideal solution for fixing up outside Christmas lights - I have a lamp in the porch which is well out of the wind and rain etc. and I could easily 'Y' off a string of outside lights to provide festive cheer.

I have tried to Google for these, but so far no luck.

Has anyone seen these about recently?

An online source perhaps?

Or are these banned by current (Yay - a pun!) regulations?

TIA Dave R

[I am sure we used to have a box of these (along with 5 amp and 15 amp plugs etc) but probably gone the way of all flesh by now.]

Any other solutions e.g. a way of tapping into an outside light?

[Toby]

That's for sure, don't know which one of a whole host of reasons they chose. I got a straight one from a car boot sale, the guy had all sorts of old electrical stuff, I thought 'that'll come in handy' but I've never needed it.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Sometime around 1970 (don't recall precisely when), it became illegal to sell electrical fittings which didn't conform to the relevant British Standard. That's when all those 'interesting' adaptors vanished from the market.

Somewhere, I've got an adaptor which is a straight through bayonet plug/socket, and off to the side is a 2-pin socket with matching plug. The plug and socket are tied with a string such that when unplugged, they are held a few inches apart, presumably so that the loose cable end stays suspended near its socket rather than falling to the ground. There were lots of strange things like this around 30 or more years ago.