Super dumb question, but I'm curious. Can a house be wired similar to a fresh water manifold, or a m-unit for motorcycle rewires?

[justcurious]

In other words, can every fixture, switch, appliance, etc go directly to a manifold of sorts so you could program/reprogram the switch to turn on different things? Kind of like using a freshwater manifold system instead of a traditional branch system. I KNOW i'm ignorant and there must be good reasons why this can't be done (I'm aware more wire would be involved) but I know nothing of electrical and i'm very curious! Thanks for letting me know...and don't be too hard on me

 

[littlespark]

Do you mean, why doesn’t everything go back to one point?

in a way, lighting used to be done like that. All the lighting points and all the switches ran back to a central joint box…. But it brought up strange faults where a bedroom switch would turn on the bathroom light, and things like that when cables weren’t marked properly.

 

[Lucien Nunes]

No reason, and in some situations this is the best approach. For example, in building management systems a bunch of inputs and outputs are often concentrated into one box containing a PLC rather than each being tacked onto the data bus separately. In entertainment lighting, dimmers and contactors were usually concentrated in one room rather than spread out around the venue, although that is lesss important now that many lighting fixtures have integral addressable controls. Even a regular breaker panel is a deliberate concentration of circuits into a single origin, compared to the historical method of running the main cables around the building and tapping off individual lights with a fuse in each room.