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GoArray t1_j56ff0j wrote

From deep in the "full article":

>One of the cost-saving measures the school board insisted on was a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light to control the lights in the building. The system was designed to save energy — and thus save money — by automatically adjusting the lights as needed.

>But in August 2021, staffers at the school noticed that the lights were not dimming in the daytime and burning brightly through the night.

>“The lighting system went into default,” said Osborne. “And the default position for the lighting system is for the lights to be on.”

>Osborne said they immediately reached out to the original installer of the system only to discover that the company had changed hands several times since the high school was built. When they finally tracked down the current owner of the company, Reflex Lighting, several more weeks went by before the company was able to find somebody familiar with the high school’s lighting system, he said.

The replacement parts are on order from china, and they're throwing in a manual override as well.

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IWankToTits t1_j56gijy wrote

How in the hell do they service the electrical system without a physical shutoff?

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GoArray t1_j56hfno wrote

The breakers still work, it's apparently how staff has been managing the issue. But yeah, the fact that no one thought to add a manual switch(es) is a bit absurd.

Sadly, I dont imagine this is a fluke by any stretch, hands off automation's a helluva drug.

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PatrickKieliszek t1_j56qgmt wrote

I have been on a project that no one put a manual switch on. I insisted they add one. No one wanted to. Eventually they complied because I wouldn't stop saying we needed it.

Adding the shut-off cost less than a thousand dollars. Probably saved sevral thousand hours of machine downtime over the life of the project.

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apcolleen t1_j57iwoc wrote

God the things I see people cheap out on in industrial facilities astounds me. My bf installs fire alarms and there are things he shows me from industrial sites he has to inspect is just idiotic. He saved a company thousands a week ago by screwing up a piece of flashing to divert a dripping pipe away from the fire alarm so they stop getting tickets from the fire department for false alarms.

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BoldestKobold t1_j57p2zj wrote

I'm gonna reply to your comment more to highlight a pet peeve of mine. As a (state) government employee at a management level, I always get a bit miffed when people try to single out government for inefficiency or shortsighted decision making. In my experience, the private sector is as bad or worse, in many respects. Reporters don't report on waste, fraud, straight up incompetence, etc inside private companies nearly as often as they do in government, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

"But boldestkobold," you say, "that's because we all pay taxes and are impacted by that waste and incompetence!" To which I respond, "you think you aren't paying for the waste and incompetence at AT&T in your cell phone bill, or at General Mills in your breakfast foods? Or if BP gets fined for an ecological disaster caused by penny pinching stupidity, they don't just roll that cost down to the customer?

(Sorry for using your comment chain to vent)

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SilkwormAbraxas t1_j58js8d wrote

Thanks for highlighting this trend. Ridiculous penny pinching on critical systems so executives can show a minor increase in profits and thus justify massive bonuses will be the death of us.

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atomicxblue t1_j5bqnjt wrote

Your comment was cogent and timely, something we don't see often around these parts.

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Aazadan t1_j5oal5j wrote

The theory as I’m sure you’re aware (but some posters might not be) is that competition should motivate companies to fix stuff like that. While government doesn’t have the same profit incentive.

In the real world things don’t work out that way because governments use those private profit driven services, and don’t have nearly the same level of oversight, while private companies don’t get any competitive advantage for all their mistakes to be looked for and made public.

And so mistakes happen and get ignored all the time.

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Alphamullet t1_j5bgb2y wrote

"Value Engineering"

...fucking hate that term.

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apcolleen t1_j5djiau wrote

Don't hate the term, hate the practice.

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Alphamullet t1_j5dyqd9 wrote

Sound advice there, seriously. I'll try to keep that in mind the next time my budget gets slashed.

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usrevenge t1_j57m05g wrote

I work at Amazon

There is a big automation push. One of the things being automated is boxes getting labels applied for sorting.

One of the sites near me had a few conveyor lines replaced with this machine back in like September.

It didn't work October they came and fixed it and it broke again shortly after.

November came and the operations team at that building was sick of it and threw it into manual mode.

They spent hundreds of thousands on a these machines and didn't use them 1 time during the holiday season. They just put them in manual which turned it into a dumb conveyor that just move box from point a to b without applying the label. Someone still had to manually scan and put the label on.

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Finagles_Law t1_j5ex9iz wrote

I used to work at a very large online furniture store. A few years back, they were in the middle of increasing their warehouse automation with smart conveyor belts for picking - instead of having humans grab a box off of the belt, a barcode scanner would read the label and divert it automatically to the right truck bay.

It took a good year to get them really working reliably, but in the end they did work, and enabled the dotcom to run with a much leaner warehouse staff.

Make no mistake, this is the way things are headed, and it will get figured out. Picking random items from a shelf is one of the harder automation problems to solve, but it will be solved, and those terrible jobs will be gone forever.

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Zorro_Returns t1_j58b41o wrote

Shutting off the entire system is not the problem. The article states they are using the breaker panels, but that's obviously not a solution. The title is somewhat misleading. They can be turned off and on, but they can't be controlled in a practical way.

Product does not work as advertised.

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ScientificSkepticism t1_j582yn7 wrote

Manual override switches should be on a dedicated control panel on the side of a unit that's only accessible with an O&M manual.

Now disconnect switches, those are big shiny red buttons, but manual switches? Oh god the stupidity that results. People will literally just not change the automation programming and hit a switch, it wrecks everything.

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mrcolon96 t1_j5739wc wrote

Lmao true. I was doing that to my house and had to stop because my mom hated the smart lights. Tbh the lights were glitchy AF.

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pegothejerk t1_j56hb4j wrote

Subscription type service, they send out a guy that knows how to turn it off in software.

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DragoonDM t1_j570gny wrote

Gotta upgrade your subscription to the Diamond+ tier to get access to the "turn off the lights" feature.

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GoArray t1_j57cfz3 wrote

Unfortunately, the Diamond+ electrons cost twice as much.

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The_ODB_ t1_j59tqyl wrote

There were no subscriptions involved. The company went bankrupt.

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echo1432 t1_j5752yi wrote

Installed lots of lighting that doesn't actually have a physical switch, everything is controlled by networked relays or even wirelessly.

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PurveyorOfUselesFact t1_j5aeh0p wrote

Lighting controls like the system at the school usually operate using 12-24v while the lights themselves use 277v(US) or 347v(canada). It's safe to work on the low voltage controls without shutting anything off. If the electrician bothers shutting off the controls at all, it's to prevent damaging components while making connections.

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Rampage_Rick t1_j5bxi0i wrote

Since they say it dimmed throughout the day, I'm going to assume that it was a 0-10V control system. Probably each room was on it's own 0-10V channel, daisy-chained between each luminarie. Power for luminaries could come from any number of branch circuits (probably 277V)

Master controller fails, every channel goes to 10V, everything goes full bright.

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AStartIsBorn OP t1_j56fqiw wrote

Designed to save energy and money by defaulting to always on. Interesting.

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Thriftyverse t1_j56wo33 wrote

It's a design flaw, sure, but for the design they did, it makes sense to default to 'always on'.

If default was 'always off' then there would be no way to turn the lights on at all. Which would mean lights out until a service tech could get out there.

Having it be 'always on' means you can still use the breakers to turn them off, so at least there is a way.

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needabiggerhammer t1_j571uop wrote

Yeah, that is just a safety thing. Don't want the system going out and leaving everyone in the dark. Esp. if it went out because of an emergency.

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Thriftyverse t1_j57e7db wrote

And it's good that they bothered with safety, because they didn't really think all of it through when they designed it.

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OAMP47 t1_j588xro wrote

That suddenly triggered a decade and a half old memory from my time renting in college. Scheduled maintenance of the blocks' power grid. My apartment was accessible from an interior hallway on the second floor with no windows. Coming home from grocery shopping that was the day we all discovered the emergency lights in the building didn't work and it was pitch black trying to feel the way up the stairs and to anyone's unit door.

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GoArray t1_j57czwn wrote

Spot on, one (shitty) caveat though. Had they defaulted to always off, the issue probably would have been addressed almost immediately.

Folks can live with too much electricity, shut it off and all hell breaks loose.

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Thriftyverse t1_j57ehpa wrote

Yeah, at always off they would have fixed it, but probably not added a manual override. Just repaired and sent out the same way.

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Morat20 t1_j570wy8 wrote

Auto-on makes sense for lights. If there's a failure, it's nicer if you can see what you're working on.

And doubly so for a building that likely has plenty of fully indoor rooms, with poor to nonexistent natural lighting, so if the system breaks and it defaults to off you have a bunch of people in the dark trying to get out.

Like any of the school theaters or band rooms in my HS back in the day would have been pitch-black nightmares. Of course people have phones now which help, but you really don't want to depend on whomever is suddenly in a pitch-black room having their phone on them.

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biggsteve81 t1_j58bzq8 wrote

Even more serious, imagine if the bathroom lights all switched completely off.

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Mend1cant t1_j58meqs wrote

Been there before. Motion sensor was set way too short on the shutoff. Couldn’t get an angle from the stall.

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AStartIsBorn OP t1_j5769il wrote

You make an excellent point. However, maybe the lights shouldn't be set to full-blast as the default mode. For instance, emergency lights (at least ones that I have encountered), don't offer as much light as normal lights, but enough to make things comfortably visible.

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Morat20 t1_j57nfqi wrote

Right but in this case default isn't "we don't have power" (emergency lights are battery powered for that reason) it's "The control system is totally not working, our software is borked, what's our failure state".

I mean if it's going to be a few days to get fixed they'll want to be able to still use the building!

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atomicxblue t1_j5br6kl wrote

I'm curious why their system didn't connect to an inexpensive light sensor on the roof or something to control the lights in the event of a default state. At least they'd only run half of the time.

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AStartIsBorn OP t1_j5c5hz2 wrote

Someone else replying to me said, in effect, that it wasn't anticipated the default state would run for so long. Sounds like somewhere along the line, they didn't think this all the way through.

Edit: Punctuation.

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Soft-Cryptographer-1 t1_j57i36q wrote

One of the US largest neighborhood security firms (gates, cards, cameras, fire systems) has been bought and sold so many times in 2 years that I have clients going on a year with non-functioning gates and security. Everything is proprietary like the mcdonalds ice cream machines. Pretty goofy stuff.

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ElectricCharlie t1_j57petr wrote

At my work we bid out a job several years ago. We’re a government org and we wanted a camera and audio system for our public meetings.

The folks in charge at the time selected the cheapest vendor, who cobbled together a bunch of random parts and called it good.

Ironically, the person who made the decision left and somewhere between contract approval and installation, I was hired in their role.

Within a year, the company folded and was bought by one of the vendors we passed over for being too expensive.

We have spent at least the value of the original contract to improve reliability of the original system. We’re also upgrading things and slowly working to more or less replace the system piecemeal - using components and designs from the vendor we originally passed over. Their stuff is reliable.

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Geoarbitrage t1_j573t9b wrote

i first read the last line as "they're throwing in a manual as well". Hope fully not in Mandarin.

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