Re: When were ring mains introduced in domestic housing?
Low socket count was quite common, even later in the sixties. My parents house had one ring for sockets, all single unswitched. It was common to get a single to double adaptor, which essentially was a surface mount double pattress that had a frame to fit it over a recessed single. A standard double socket was then fitted.
I was reminded of this, as when my parents moved out of their house, they reported a problem with one of these sockets. A quick check showed that the actual problem was an open fuse in the extension plugged in, but also that my Dad had wired the socket with L/N reversed, back in the early seventies, and it had never been noticed. That's a worry, given that they had a 'professionally' fitted new consumer unit a good twenty years earlier. Maybe I'm expecting too much that each socket would have been checked after an upgrade like this?
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