Harvey Van Sickle wrote:


In system terms, what are the practical advantages to having each
appliance plugged into a separate socket (as opposed to putting, say,
the 4 stereo plugs into a trailing socket)?

If you're clueful enough to wonder, there's no advantage ;-)

That is: Nanny would like you to know that daisychaining one 4-way
adaptor into another into another into another is bad for you (each link
adds some contact resistance, since many cheap 4-ways form their
contacts with little more than bendy tinplate), and some numpty
somewhere will plug a 3kW fanheater into the last one of such a chain.

So Nanny knows that in the limit, it's better to festoon the wall with
lots of double sockets (at Regulation not-too-close-to-the-floor height,
natch, thereby increasing the trip hazard...)

But if you avoid doing anything silly, consolidating multiple low-load
appliances into a single feed through a 4-way, 6-way, or whatever is
perfectly sound, can look better, and makes it more convenient to turn
off multiple appliances which would otherwise draw 'standby' or
wall-wart-loss currents uselessly.