Once I asked an electrician what was for me a very simple question. Well, simple to me. He looked at me like he would if I’d asked him if the bath water was probably ok to drink if I boiled it first. I’d pointed at the wall by the bathroom door and asked “can we not just put a normal switch there, like every other room has?” He put his screwdriver down. Literally put it on the ground down, for a tradesman mid job that’s like someone taking off their glasses before they have something serious to tell you. And explained, kindly, with the sort of patience you use when explaining things to women who clearly haven’t thought about it before… despite me having rewired more rooms in this house then he’s probably rewired in his entire career.
Because I knew the answer already.
No. Of course not. I just wanted to hear him tell me no.
### The bit where the answer is genuinely just no, and here’s why
The short answer to “can you have a normal light switch in a bathroom?” is no, not anywhere near the shower or bath that you can see, it’s not “that’s just how bathrooms look now”, it’s not old fashioned thinking that refuses to adapt to modern design, it’s because of building regulations and they are there for very good reasons. The reason is simple; water and electricity. Showers and baths are the one room in your house where you’re, by their very function, going to be standing wet, possibly fully clothed in said water, possibly not. And almost definitely sometimes doing both, right next to an electrical outlet. The regulations divide the room up into zones, zone 0 being inside the bath/shower itself, zone 1 being directly above that and so on. A standard wall switch, your average On/Off switch that you flick with your dry finger in absolute fucking mind-numbing boredom across every other room in your house without a second thought isn’t rated to fit inside any of those zones because it’s not sealed against moisture like it absolutely, 100%, needs to be.
That’s not being born cautious on your behalf, that’s there actually being lots of documented cases of people dying because someone else didn’t listen and decided it was “fine as it is.”
What goes in its place is either a pull cord switch (If you’re old enough to remember the ones your Mum hates getting caught on your clothes), or a switch positioned by the door (which means the_inside_of_my_head-splurt/) or, increasingly now, a sensor switch which knows you’ve walked into the room; the bit that sounds like something out of the inventory for a futuristic hotel in 2004 but honestly has gotten amazingly good at detecting actual humans. I once had an electrician try and sell me one of these, circa 2015 and I scoffed at him and said “no, there’s no way I’m letting the bathroom light have an opinion about when I enter a room” before going and getting one and fitting it myself during the last refresh because the goddamn pull cord on the old one had started clicking like a dying mouse whenever you pulled it. And I will begrudgingly admit that to date, the sensor switch has never failed to work. Not once. Where, by contrast, I could tell you several human beings I’ve hired who failed me far more regularly than that light ever did.
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There’s a woman out there who I want to have words with about how pull cords are designed. Back in the 1990s she was entirely certain that pull cords were an outdated safety feature masquerading as design, and that “one day they’ll come up with something that doesn’t need them, you’ll see.” Technology has “come up” with plenty of things since then and trust me, the pull cord is still there because A) It works B) it’s cheap as chips and C) doesn’t need batteries or home in on your nervous system and decide to turn itself on at 3am just to mess with you.
### What I’ve actually learned from getting this wrong twice.
When I first had a bathroom fully fitted (Which was many, many decades ago at this point) I asked for the light switch to go right outside the bathroom door because “tidier.” What they don’t tell you about having the switch outside the bathroom door is that every guest who ever stays in your home will, at some point in their stay, walk blindly into your bedroom in the darkness searching for a light switch that obviously should be somewhere else. My sister came to stay not long after it got done and wandered downstairs after her shower the next morning and told me, in the flat, flat way she has of letting me know she was displeased, that she’d almost walked into the airing cupboard looking for the bathroom lights. Sister did not need to elaborate any further than that. Bathroom = untreated.
The second time round I swung too far in the opposite direction and got a pull cord fitted with the pull being described, and I am not exaggerating at all here, on the packaging as having a “LIFETIME GUARANTEE.” Against a bit of string. On a bit of nylon string attached to a fucking plastic toggle. I have never, nor will I ever, in my life need to claim on a lifetime guarantee for a length of string. If you do, let me know how that call goes.
Now, I put the switch outside the door.
For reasons outlined above and in-between I accept that the bathroom is not like every other room.
It’s different. For starters it’s filled with water. You’re not looking for design cohesion here you’re looking for not killing someone. Again. Hopefully that someone isn’t you, but you get the idea. The switch isn’t a downgrade, or living in the stone age, it’s a make sure everyones sheaths are fully intact when you step out of the shower switch. And once you’ve had the “look mate” face and tone my electrician gave me when explaining it to me properly, you don’t care about having a normal switch. You just want the one that works, every goddamn time.
