Two power outlets per room? Are you from the 1950's?

One of the benefits of building a new house is that you get to address all those things that annoy you in houses built over the last 50 years.

One pet hate of mine is having to use power boards. And with good reason too: talk to any electrician, and they will tell you that power boards are a huge problem (although presumably not for them, since they are also the source of a lot of work). Although I hate them simply because they are a pain in the ass, and should absolutely unnecessary in any house built in the last ten years.

And yet, surprisingly, not only did I have to explicitly request a reasonable amount of power outlets when designing a new house, but I also got a lot of strange looks when I told the builder that I wanted 8 power outlets in the main bedroom.

The standard was 4 outlets: 2 on each side of the bed. But now think about how easily those two power outlets would be used. A clock radio and a bedside lamp is all that it would take to max out the two outlets available on your side of the bed. If you want to run a fan, charge your phone, use a laptop on the bed or plug in a vacuum cleaner, you will need to use a power board or juggle what is plugged into the wall.

The living room also came with only two outlets in the area where you would setup the entertainment area. Two outlets? That's a TV and a DVD player. What about the XBox, the sound system, the iPod dock?

This mindset of having two power outlets might have been great in the 50's, when your life was not run by things with on/off switches. If builders can release iPhone apps to allow you design a house, surely they can work out that we need houses that allow iPhones to be charged without having to have power boards laying around.

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