"Mike Clarke" wrote in message
...
Ours comes on and stays on 24/7 if the power goes off for a second and
then comes back on (eg when the high-voltage feed to the village fails
*yet again*). I have to be alert to the problem, and turn the power to
the light off (turn off the lighting circuit MCB, since the lamp appears
to be hard-wired with no switch) and then turn it back on after a delay
of about 10 seconds. It is a confounded nuisance.

On the other hand, that is a useful feature for many people. I can switch
our front light off and on so as to "lock" it on while I do some work on
the car or just look for something in the boot. Similarly, I can do the
same with the garage light when I am cutting something outside, in the
evening. I specifically looked out for lights with that feature as it is
so useful. on the other hand, we very rarely suffer momentary power
failures and I can see how it would be a real nuisance there. Maybe they
should build in a 12 hour timer to cancel that feature automatically.

Some versions overcome the problem of brief power failures by requiring
the light to be flipped off twice in quick succession to put them on
permanently.

With the sort of power cuts we had one night, even that wouldn't have
prevented accidental latching of the light. At most I think I counted a run
of four off-on in the course of about 5 seconds. Those automatic
power-restoring circuit breakers at the substation are a little *too*
enthusiastic: it would be better if there was a minimum off time of about 5
seconds to avoid false-triggering. Of course it would be even better if the
power company did their job properly and made sure that vegetation was not
allowed to grow close to the wires, so it could always be trimmed safely
without needing a planned power cut, and certainly not so it get so close
that it causes an unplanned one. A large fine to the power company for each
and every power outage that a customer experiences would be a good
incentive. You tend to expect flaky power when you are in the middle of
nowhere, although when we lived in a tin hamlet of two farms and five
cottages, I don't think the power went off once in the year we lived there,
whereas when we are in a village with about 500 people, about 5 miles from
two different market towns, we've had about 10 times when the power has gone
off and on in the six months we've lived here (if it happens repeatedly on
one day, I count that as a single event). The power company had the cheek to
suggest that anyone who had electronic equipment should have it protected by
UPS (an admission that power breaks were only to be expected) and that
anyone whose equipment got confused by repeated power blips had faulty
equipment. My router eventually got confused after an evening of
up-down-up-down (the router still logged on but it gave "destination
unavailable" when almost any web address was pinged - apart from the ISP's
own web site; DNS was working because the address was being resolved to the
correct IP address). That was cured by restoring the router to its factory
state - I need to remember to re-create the port-forwarding rules so we can
see our webcams from outside the LAN.