Replacement wall light switches

[Huge]

Hot on the left, cold on the right, shit rolls downhill.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

All cold on the right here. If you look at mixer taps on display, they're generally that way too.

[Roger Mills]

That indeed is the convention. One reason for having a convention is to ensure that blind or partially sighted people don't inadvertently scald themselves by opening the hot tap when they wanted cold.

Having said that, not all the taps in my house follow the convention!

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Quite. Difficult to allow for lazy plumbers. ;-)

[Roger Mills]

I'm afraid that I have to own up for one of them. I wasn't aware of the convention at the time, and I wanted to insert quarter turn lever valves in the hot and cold supply pipes to the bath. Because of the pipe layout, and the fact that there's a shower connection tee'd into the hot pipe in an awkward place, it was far easier to swap hot and cold pipes. So I guess I'm one of your lazy plumbers!

[Chris French]

The taps for our bath are mounted one above the other (they are really tap valves I guess, recessed into a partition, the outlet being a spout mounted elsewhere on the partition

[John Rumm]

When I changed a shower valve [1] I was scratching my head for some time trying to work out how to swap over the hot and cold feeds in the confines of the wall recess, when it was nearly impossible to get to the pipes from the other side...

Then I realised the "helpful" red and blue hot and cold stickers they had stuck on the valve did not actually match the embossed H and C cast into the brasswork! Peeling the stickers off suddenly made the job so much easier ;-)

[1]

[Andrew Gabriel]

The reason for this is that before there was hot running water, you only had a cold tap, and with the majority of people being right handed, the tap was often on pipework brought up on the right hand side of the sink.

[Johnny B Good]

I can't remember what the existing arrangement was when we moved in but that's exactly the case in our house after having a kitchen extension built a couple of years after moving in.

The downstairs shower and loo which occupies the original kitchen space and was the original reason for having the extension built on a disability grant for my parents in law's sake now sports a uniblock mixing tap since it was refurbished some 3 or 4 years ago and the lever position for cold is to the left, off is down and on is up with the hot to the right hand side.

Effectively the two axis tap lever uses up and down to control flow volume and acts like a temperature control going from left to right to increase the mix temperature. This convention would logically translate into left hand for the cold tap and right hand for the hot tap (which makes our kitchen mixer tap the wrong way round).

I suspect that most people, if asked for their opinion on this, would go for the cold on the left and the hot on the right as being the most logical arrangement. However, this does seem to be at the whim of whichever plumber has fitted such hot and cold taps.

If there is a standard relating to this, it may simply be in the form of a "preferred where possible" type of standard. I just don't know, merely expressing an opinion and our current arrangements on the disposition of the hot and cold taps in our house.

[Johnny B Good]

Or bath (adding to my previous reply where the logic of the unilever monoblock hand basin mixer tap in our shower room suggested otherwise.

I'm afraid I overlooked the bath taps when mentioning the mismatch between the bath room wash basin and the kitchen sink taps. Ignoring the monoblock unilever tap,it seems the traditional cold on the right hand side wins by 2:1 in our house.

[Tim Streater]

Cold on the right applies to everything in our house.

[DICEGEORGE]

Cold on the right in UK.

Is it the other way round in France?

[g]