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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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Amazingawesomator t1_j56huvx wrote

Wait a minute.... Part of this high tech lighting package didnt include manual light switches?

What if its movie day?

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ToxicAdamm t1_j570h0w wrote

When you are bidding on a project, you are incentivized to come in at the lowest price possible. So, you skimp on 'features' and then try to upsell them (at twice the price) once you won the bid.

The other sneaky thing you can do is use off-the-shelf parts, obscure the mfg part# and renumber it with your own number. Then when the customer needs to replace those parts, they come back to you with your part # and then you can upcharge them again.

Now you know one of the reasons why projects that use public funds cost so much.

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Altruistic-Tower-784 t1_j57h9d4 wrote

Sure contractors cut corners, but they can’t exclude circuit breakers because they are required by the National Electrical Code (NFPA 70). Just turn off the breakers that power the lighting ballasts. So dumb…

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JanitorKarl t1_j57tag8 wrote

My first thought as well. Where are the circuit breakers? Turn the breakers off.

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Zorro_Returns t1_j589ef7 wrote

Have you ever tried controlling your home's electric devices from a breaker panel? Now imagine some 7,000 individual lights. 1) you don't have as much specific control, 2) it's a pain in the ass to walk over to a panel 3) how do you turn off "this" light, without turning off all the others on the circuit?

Anyway, the article states that they are doing that with some of the breakers, and removing individual lighting elements in some other fixtures.

Just because the article is dumb, read it anyway. People aren't as dumb as you wish they were :)

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redcapmilk t1_j59mslu wrote

Remember when they had to turn the lights back on in Jurassic Park? People get hurt, People die.

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Fuzzy_Logic_4_Life t1_j582bok wrote

I worked in a box store and that is how we turned off all of the lights at night. It’s just so much faster than walking around turning them all off individually.

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Zorro_Returns t1_j589lqt wrote

Evidently, you can turn off a whole town with a few bullets.

7

nochinzilch t1_j586lwa wrote

They surely have breakers. But those are probably in a locked electrical room. And the maintenance people (if there are any) can't be bothered to turn them on and off every day.

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freebirth t1_j58rd6z wrote

if they dont have manitenance people. that school woudlnt run for more then a week.

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Zorro_Returns t1_j588zoy wrote

That's what they've been doing according to the article. Or physically removing bulbs. Yeah, it is dumb, but it's that's not going to be a feasible workaround. Having to walk down the hall and into a locked panel room to turn something on and off would get old fast. And you wouldn't be able to address specific uses, like you would with traditional switches.

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BoldestKobold t1_j57ptdh wrote

> When you are bidding on a project, you are incentivized to come in at the lowest price possible. So, you skimp on 'features' and then try to upsell them (at twice the price) once you won the bid.

As a government employee who has had to deal with procurement before, this pisses me off so much. A vendor comes in with a suspiciously lowball bid, but the procurement people (who work for a DIFFERENT STATE AGENCY, but can veto any procurement action done by any other agency) say we have to accept it.

Meanwhile all our subject matter specialists are looking at management like we're idiots. An industry leader will bid, give us a pretty good price discount (since as a state agency we're buying in bulk for most goods and services), but we have to go with some fly by night place that everyone is pretty sure will suck and lead to cost overruns, but because they bid 10% less we are forced to accept it.

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Tvmouth t1_j57udhp wrote

> we are forced to accept it.

and if it's a bad deal, people get paid to decide if lawyers get paid to argue about it. failure is a job's program, the fact that this is a school is a double slap in the face: how can any kid trust adults that are so blatantly corrupt and wasteful for the sake of casting blame and creating more jobs.

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ReplyingToFuckwits t1_j57zy8i wrote

> Now you know one of the reasons why projects that use public funds cost so much.

It's also by design in most countries where major political parties are just slightly different versions of neoliberalism.

These kinds of projects are an extremely effective method for converting public funds into private profits by massively overcharging for everything.

Politicians turn a blind eye to it because the people being awarded the work are often friends and family, or people who went to the "right" school.

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Ranger_Prick t1_j56t2ol wrote

"All right, kids, let's get the giant paper rolls and block out the lights. The darker the color, the better!"

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[deleted] t1_j57r294 wrote

[deleted]

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nochinzilch t1_j587llq wrote

It is likely there are very nice modules in each classroom that allow for that, as well as occupancy sensing and daylight dimming. But that all goes through a lighting controller that is apparently malfunctioning.

My alternate theory is that there is no lighting controller, and the switches just got "un paired" with the fixtures they are supposed to control, and nobody knows how to fix them.

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nochinzilch t1_j58637c wrote

That is how all large lighting systems work. The "switches" you see on the wall are just telling the lighting controller to turn the lights on.

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zviggy47 t1_j5ffifp wrote

I’m from that school. We have to watch movies with the lights completely on and terrible speakers from the computer. It’s literal torture.

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NickDanger3di t1_j570eue wrote

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and speculate that the school and town bureaucracy made a really, really bad decision and cheaped out when they should have purchased from a reliable and stable source.

School administrations are not famous for their intelligent spending practices; our local small town (15,000 pop) HS had a huge battle spending over $70 million on a new HS in the 90s. When it was done and I went to the big open house, I saw huge round atrium (I think round rooms cost extra?), with cabinets in the offices made from flimsy chipboard that you'd find in cheap home construction, and some other bad choices as well.

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Gunter73 t1_j56pgli wrote

There is a light that never goes out

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SupaSays t1_j572b4f wrote

Something similar happened in a meeting room rebuild at my work. Fancy new wireless scene controller/dimmer for meeting room ceiling led lights, but its needs to know the serial of each light to join it to the controller. No auto discovery function for system, no simple override switch for the lights. Electrician left without joining all of it together and took the serial info with them. Lights stayed 24/7 on for 3 years until they tracked down the info to finish the setup.

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nochinzilch t1_j587uiw wrote

It is printed right on the devices.

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SupaSays t1_j58d1fd wrote

Printed on the devices which were sprinkled liberally around 20ft up inside a finished ceiling. Fishing them back out to read the codes was considered but as last resort as the ceiling would be damaged and have to be partially redone.

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noiamholmstar t1_j5bhk7l wrote

Honestly, though bad from an energy use perspective, if they’re led lights it might very well be more expensive to disassemble (and repair) the ceiling enough to get the codes and properly program them than it would be to just leave the lights on for several years.

2

Qx7x t1_j56shvl wrote

Save money on your new build. Who needs switches? Save the cash and just wire all the lights directly.

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jrgkgb t1_j584nnw wrote

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

~Douglas Adams

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SenselessNoise t1_j56hd4c wrote

They needed the Intelli-Link Centurion package.

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BoomerPants2Point0 t1_j56q88b wrote

Flipping the breakers off that are protecting the lighting circuits will turn the lights off. It doesn't matter if the control system defaults to full output, no power means no lights (except the emergency fixtures). If lighting control panels were used with relay controlled circuit breakers, flip the main breaker in the panel off or flip the upstream breaker in the distribution board off. Also, this installation wouldn't meet ASHRAE 90.1 2010 energy code (which is the code Massachusetts was using in 2012 from what I can find). Even back then, manual controls and manual override switches were required in addition to automatic off controls. The engineer of record, plan checker and/or the building inspector should of caught this prior to substantial completion and turnover. Sounds like a shit show all around.

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DragoonBoots t1_j587lrp wrote

Lighting controls technician here. Everything this person said is correct.

On top of this, one of the things I always go over when training the owners and caretakers of sites we work on (and these are videotaped and documented in operations guides) is "what to do when the lights are stuck off" and "what to do when the lights are stuck on." I'm not familiar with the system installed here, but every control system should have a way to force loads on/off when it's failed. It may not be graceful (like the folks discussing circuit breakers), but it's there.

3

nochinzilch t1_j588rzo wrote

I'm sure there were switch modules in the classrooms, but when the controller software crashed, they lost their connection to the individual fixtures.

I'm not too familiar with lighting controls, but I seem to remember reading the documentation on one particular system which can be wired in a way so that if the controller disappears, the devices in each room will at least auto discover themselves and work independently. But it required a particular wiring topology, or maybe some kind of bridge device, that separated each space.

2

Geoarbitrage t1_j57342z wrote

In other news the electric supplier was able to buy a new truck fleet.

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Hokulewa t1_j58iigl wrote

>we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.

...except call an electrician.

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Kesshh t1_j57omgo wrote

Make it some projects for the kids in the school. Do it and you get an A type thing. It’ll be fixed within a month.

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ledgerdemaine t1_j57t7pc wrote

Wait, cant the BeeGees help here? I heard they are familiar with lights in Massachusetts.

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Odd-Cartoonist-288 t1_j58t766 wrote

There is no way this would be that hard to fix and would probably pay for itself very quickly.

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CherenkovLight t1_j56g97m wrote

Sounds like the hook for a horror film

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lvhockeytrish t1_j58irnh wrote

The lights must stay on.

^(The lights must stay on.)

^(^The ^lights ^must ^stay ^on.)

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international862_ t1_j57brkb wrote

Lol just have the maintenance guy flip the breakers off at night. These people are dense. Lighting control system be damned, the lights are still plugged into a panel somewhere

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nochinzilch t1_j589dgw wrote

Exactly. But they probably don't have on site engineers. Or if they do, they are unable or unwilling to do that. And there's no budget to just hire an electrician to come in and unfuck the system. Instead, they just let them run because that's someone else's budget.

1

Kind_Dress t1_j57nb08 wrote

Guaranteed they fired the guy who knows how they work and they would rather have the lights on 24/7 than pay for his help.

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evilpeter t1_j581h95 wrote

I wouldn’t be surprised if that was an option but the school board decided it was unnecessary

3

bullybullybully t1_j58hkxp wrote

I recently moved into an old house and there is no apparent switch for the light in my mud room. On all the time. I just switched them to super low wattage LEDs and am living with it until I redo the electrical for the house.

3

ChiAnndego t1_j58rwo9 wrote

As a manager of a few old duplexes, 100% the light you are talking about was probably a non-switched, always-on circuit and light fixture there in the past would have had a pull chain to turn off/on. This is how they handled all closet/secondary lighting back in the day. Some DIYer probably swapped out the fixture with a modern one (no pull chain) and didn't care.

FWIW - You can buy an old-style fixture with an internal chain switch for like $10. You can just buy an add-on pull chain switch and add to an existing fixture. Or, you can get a smart bulb that has a wireless remote.

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edingerc t1_j58nib4 wrote

This is what happens when the instruction manual for the system is written by IKEA ;)

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Patriot009 t1_j56ued0 wrote

Probably a fair assumption that there's a power relay bank somewhere being controlled by software, as I highly doubt these are all "smart bulbs". If that's the case, just bypass the software unit with a panel of physical switches. It isn't as fancy, but it'll do the job.

2

nochinzilch t1_j5891mb wrote

Modern commercial lighting is installed with two connections: always on power, and then some kind of control. Either a data cable, or 0-10 volt wiring, or some kind of wireless thing. When the control method is not connected (or malfunctioning), the lights default to on for safety.

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Patriot009 t1_j58no74 wrote

Ah, I see. Probably one of the first two, I feel like wireless capability for 7000 lights would be ridiculously expensive.

Edit: Possibly panel mounted pots for the second option instead of switches.

1

stulew t1_j57ws5k wrote

Who-ever wrote the specifications, did not include a mandatory manual over-ride switch or include industry standard software support. Most likely suspect: the engineer and contracting officer.

2

Zorro_Returns t1_j58c0ui wrote

Evidently, few commenters read the article, so...

The title is misleading. They are using circuit breakers, and/or removing lighting elements where they can. But it's obviously not a solution. Imagine if all the appliances in your kitchen were either on, or off, depending on a circuit breaker in another room.

The problem is that the software that controls the lights is broken, and evidently, they think they need "parts from China" to fix it, but it took weeks to find a guy familiar with the system.

That's amazingly fucked up. Software should not need "parts from China" to be fixed. Didn't they get any documentation with it? Hell, there are probably students at that school who could fix the software, but evidently nobody even knows that you don't fix software with "parts from China".

FWIW, there are some LED contractors that live near me, and I will ask the if they know about this case. Maybe they have some "parts from China". Lord knows, we Americans just aren't smart enough to make our own technology. /s

2

Eiodalin t1_j5a5u1e wrote

As a local to the area I have worked with reflex lighting as a contractor, the ownership (at them time) is awful, incompetent, and plain rude to most of the companies they work with. I would not work with them again if they where a choice

2

nandos677 t1_j5cyxit wrote

Like most of the students from this school: the lights are on but no one is home

2

alphaparson t1_j57up08 wrote

The system is a number of controllers that are controlled by a computer system with the failed software. The controllers and communication wiring is the expensive part and is already done. Pull the old controllers and install new. Make sure that the new controllers have manual override switches. Install a new computer and program. The interconnecting wiring was the expensive part. ALSO. Controllers can be installed that are open protocol, any master computer can talk to it.

1

Menarc t1_j57wsxf wrote

They don’t have a breaker panel or ten?

1

s4burf t1_j59zagl wrote

Whoever purchased that system should be made to show up every night and unscrew lightbulbs. Then again in the morning every day to screw them back in.

1

Musicfan637 t1_j5ah04l wrote

That’s another level of smart.

1

WolfThick t1_j57fajz wrote

Sounds like Stephen King stuff here eternal light School

0

HockeyDad1981 t1_j56pqey wrote

“OK Google, turn off the lights”

−1

CCWaterBug t1_j57eim4 wrote

Ya, had my neighbor show me his fancy Google lights, took 6 attempts to get them on, then off.

My dumb switches work fine, I'll stick with them until I start losing fingers.

2

Tvmouth t1_j57tgkm wrote

And not one of you overpaid big wigs can bare to imagine a learning opportunity about electrical installations? not a single adult knows how to work a screw driver to install a breaker box? this is bureaocratic horse shit. who is paying these fucking morons? There's gotta be ten homeless guys that can fix that for a fucking burger. household electricity is fifth grade science.

−1

freshfantastic t1_j56f21x wrote

Just stop paying your hydro bill.

−5

blankyblankblank1 t1_j57s6vs wrote

This wouldn't happen if the school were in Texas.

−7

SamurottX t1_j56gxal wrote

Can't they just shut off the breakers, or some other manual override? I can't imagine there's an actual physical problem forcing the lights on. If I had to guess, I'd say doing so voids a warranty or some terms or service and some random administrator doesn't want to do that, instead wasting thousands of dollars a month.

−10

illy-chan t1_j56igae wrote

Sounds like only some things have physical breakers?

> when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.

6

SomeDEGuy t1_j56il21 wrote

Last sentence of the article "And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights."

6

edthesmokebeard t1_j56iqtg wrote

Throw the fucking breaker. The lights will shut off.

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