Why Don't Hotels Have Ceiling Lights? | by Five Guys

I’ve always been frustrated by this, and my hotel in DC made me look into it. It turns out there are several reasons. When constructing the building, it is extremely fast, cheap, and easy to build the walls by laying concrete with no regard for things like lights, room walls, etc. Building this way also leaves no cavity between floors to run wire through. Next, think about the value per unit length of height of the building. No ceiling light or fan means lower ceilings, which means more floors (and therefore rooms) per vertical unit length. Marking out where the lights will go in each room would also make room layout (both where the rooms go in a floor and where the furniture goes in a room) less flexible. Add all these snippets to the incredible ease of plugging lamps into the wall in lieu of overhead lighting, and you’re left with a frustratingly low likelihood of entering a reasonably priced hotel room with sufficient overhead lighting.

Why not ceiling lights?

In the USA most rooms must have a light switch. Builders lobbied an Electrical Code change to allow switching a receptacle instead of an overhead light. This saves the cost of running wire to a ceiling box, drywalling around it, and fitting an overhead light. (Especially when many hotels use construction methods such as prefab or poured concrete, which would make fitting a ceiling light very difficult). The cost of making some receptacles switched is trivial by comparison, since receptacles are already required. This is all about cost.

In this scheme, the homeowner or proprietor is expected to plug in a floor or desk lamp. Those have their own switches, making it possible to render the room switch totally inoperative. A homeowner is expected to learn a habit. A guest or first-responder is on his own.

This same Code (and economics) applies to hotel rooms.

A problem/convenience in hotels

A desk or floor lamp is just not enough light. (halogen torchiere lights were, but they fell out of style). Also, some people who share rooms or beds want to operate out of sync, one sleeping while the other burns a reading light, so it is common to provide a desk lamp on each side of a queen or king bed. Others also want task lighting at the provided desk or counter. When I travel with others, this is a blessing: we turn off the main light, my partner turns in, and I read off a bedside light -and don't have to get out of bed to turn it off.

At least one of the lights, must provide the statutory switched light. These, being commodity types, typically have a local switch also.

Your best practice in a US hotel is not to use the on-lamp switches at all, until you learn which ones are controlled by the light switches. Operate the light switches first; if that does nothing, then go for the on-lamp switch.

Also watch out when charging your devices; they often wire extra receptacles to be switched (or one of two sockets switched) - if you rely on those, they will stop charging when you turn off the light.