Piglet John - or electric people?

[goodasitgets]

I have a conundrum
Actually I thought I had gone mad but I haven't honestly
So my bedroom has a double plug socket. One plug is fairy lights, the other is iPhone charger
Fairy lights switched off at plug but iphone in and charging. If I touch the volume buttons or metal bit on my iPhone while it's charging, the fairy light bulbs glow
Not fully on but v definitely glowing
Am I some kind of electricity conduit, or about to spontaneously combust, or is the wiring in the house as utterly crap as the rest of the build...?
And yes I have just spent ten minutes pressing my phone to see which bit makes the lights glow

Stop using that socket and get it looked at by an electrician asap.

If it is a genuine iphone charger, and not off a market stall, the phone should be totally isolated from the mains by a little transformer, and safe. The LED is more likely to be cheaply made.

Very low current electronic devices, such as small LEDs and energy saving lamps, sometimes show strange effects from capacitive coupling. The electrical load is too small to drain it away and the lamp glows or flickers. You sometimes see it on hall and landing lights. You can make it go away by fitting an old-fashioned indandescent bulb with a filament.

However I have not heard of it with a phone charger before. It might happen if you have two transformers close to each other and there is an induced current, especially if one or both of them is poor quality.

If your socket circuit board is protected by an RCD and it trips when you press the test button, it is probably safe, but if you think your wiring is in poor condition you had better have it inspected and tested and get a written test report. You need an electrician who is a member of one of the self-certification schemes such as NICEIC (preferably not just a domestic installer which is the lowest grade).

Not genuine but it's the Amazon Apple approved one, plug is Belkin so a decent brand
Fairy lights are v expensive ones "ahem" over £50
The wiring comment was because I had a light keep blowing bulbs and when we investigated they hadn't made a great job of wiring

Oh and it's a new build property (about 8 years old now)

it would be interesting to see what happens when you plug them both into another twin socket, or one in another house.

I could possibly try that tomorrow, there's a twin socket in the living room
The hallway light (I'm not technical sorry!) when my dad investigated they had left a wire next to sharp metal so it was just rubbing against it and every time we fitted a bulb it blew
The build... I don't think is the best

you could I suppose buy a Martindale Socket Tester. They are a very rough tool that will only detect gross errors, but it will spot bad mistakes like No Earth, or Wrong Polarity. It has three little lights and you just plug it in.

I think we have one somewhere...
This has only started since I got new fairy lights. Socket was prev used for other fairy lights and never noticed a problem

maybe new ones are LED and old ones were filament. The filament drains away tiny currents so you can't see them.