Louisa Pearson: ‘You’ll never catch me trying to retrieve my frisbee from an electricity substation’

Trying to understand how electricity works is an ongoing challenge for me. Every year I ask for a children’s science encyclopaedia that will explain it; every year Santa fails to deliver.

Don’t get me started on how telephones work. Electrons moving along wires, I can just about visualise. But voices?

This week delivered a flabbergasting shock that added another dimension to the whole electricity debacle. In the US, plug sockets don’t have switches. The current is permanently on. This is what my American visitors told me as they laughingly pointed at our on/off switches, muttering things along the lines of, “How quaint.” Then things got weirder. An English friend said, “There were no switches in my house when I was growing up; I wonder when they were introduced?”

Through all of this I sat in stunned silence. No on/off switch? Isn’t there an American toddler being electrocuted every day by sticking sticky fingers into the socket? No switches in ye olde Britain? A quick bit of research reveals this was (and in some homes still is) the case. It all makes me very nervous. Having had the privilege of growing up in the 1970s, when TV public safety broadcasts were at their finest (you’ll never catch me trying to retrieve my Frisbee from an electricity substation), I have always switched everything off at the plug so as to avoid the risk of a house fire.

With this in mind, I have never understood people leaving appliances on standby. Aren’t they worried about their homes burning down, let alone their carbon footprint? A new report by the Energy Saving Trust, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has found that “domestic background standby consumption” is much higher than previously thought. The report, Powering the Nation, discovered that between nine and 16 per cent of the electricity we use is consumed by appliances on standby. In money terms, this equates to £50 to £86 a year on the average bill of £530.

A lifestyle change here is a no-brainer. Switch appliances off at the socket and you save money and cut carbon emissions – assuming your socket has a switch. To be fair, I understand the mindset of a standby offender. The batteries in my TV remote control ran down recently, and while they were recharging I huffed, puffed and grumbled every time I had to get up, walk over and change the channel manually. If switching off at the socket is not an ingrained habit, I can see that it might be tempting not to bother. But think of that £50 you could save.

For those who are too far gone to start switching off at the plug, firms like Bye Bye Standby (www.byebyestandby.com) have a range of products that effectively do it for you. You plug everything into a gadget and then use a remote control to fully switch things off rather than making that arduous trek over to the wall. It also has a clever ‘powerdown strip’, which automatically switches off your speakers, printer and other accessories when you shut down your computer. If a gadget like this helps, then go for it.

For people with no on/off switch, I am not entirely sure what to recommend except pulling out the plug very, very carefully after switching off the appliance. Better still, get an electrician to replace your terrifying sockets for ones with switches.

And on that note, I am powering down, switching off, unplugging and sitting back to try, once again, to understand how electricity works.