12 ms·
Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
- rasengan0 4y agoThe New Math of Dependency: $1,200,000 divided by 1200 students = $1000 per student
- wodenokoto 4y agocosts thousands a months, and over a million to fix. Whatever energy savings they are getting from that system, it doesn't seem to be enough for it to pay for itself.
- themitigating 4y agoIt costs millions to replace the entire system which may or may not be done since they are working on a fix. The system has 7000 bulbs and has been installed for 10 years. The energy savings already occurred and the inability to shut off the lights isn't a normal occurrence
- Aeolun 4y ago7000x50 = 350000 for smart light bulbs. What are they paying the other 700k for?
- themitigating 4y agoInstallation, fixtures, master controls. I doubt they have 7000 bulbs on blutooth.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoNo problem it's free.
- jack_riminton 4y agoI really want to see what horrible complexity they concocted to ruin the simple lightbulb (see https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit for more terrible 'IoT' ideas)
- samwillis 4y agoThis is fundamentally why I'm so sceptical of putting "smart" control equipment into my home. It's very expesive to fit in the first place, and then there is the incredibly high chance it will become redundant or unmaintainable in the next 5 to 10 years. You just won't see the payoff in that time. Much better to just turn the lights off when you leave a room, or turn the heating down and wear another layer. We have Nest to control our heating, we have turned off all the "intelligent" features, they don't work. Now it's just a heating scheduler and thermostat that we can control when out of the house, which frankly is all we want. But on this case specifically, I assume they had "smart" lighting control panels in each room, and these have failed. The idea of not having some sort of manual override in each room is nuts.
- amelius 4y agoElectronics hobbyist magazines of the 70s and 80s are full of better Nest replacements.
- autora 4y agoConsidering parent, myself and most people I talk to consider the point of Nest being the ability to control their thermostat when they are out of the house, I don't understand how any system in the 70s or 80s could even work at all like a Nest, let alone better. No mobile phones, no widespread use of the internet and a hobbyist can make a thermostat you can control when out of the house? Would love to know how?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 4y agoSomething connected to the phone line maybe?
- braingenious 4y agoI’m curious, what is the big draw of controlling your thermostat in real time that is significantly better than just (for example) a timer? As an argument against connecting one’s thermostat to the internet, I’ll point to this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-energy-companies-remotely-raised-smart-thermostats-temperatures-2021-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-energy-companies-remot...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 4y agoSurely there is a circuit breaker somewhere.
- wikfwikf 4y agoYou can't flip a circuit breaker every night and every morning. Firstly the school's safety code would not allow it. Secondly they are not designed for that. Thirdly, there are probably lots of things in a high school which need to be kept on overnight: computers, fridges, lab equipment.
- sokoloff 4y agoMost circuit breakers that you’ll find on lighting circuits are designed for switching duty of modern lighting loads. Circuit breakers so designed will have an “SWD” printed in them (“switching duty”)
- Aeolun 4y agoSince you can turn off the lights with a normal switch every night and morning, I’m inclined to say you can do the same with an entire circuit.
- samwhiteUK 4y ago
- kbos87 4y agoThere should be some culpability and at the very least reputational damage for whoever decided to install such a system in the first place. I’m guessing it was the architect. The decision to layer in a system like this was clearly done without considering how it might fail, how it would be supported, and the strength of the vendor it was being bought from. These all strike me as 101 level procurement questions that were probably overlooked in favor of slapping a “green” label on the building. And for what? LED lighting is pretty damned efficient, and there are plenty of approaches to curbing unnecessary lighting use that don’t introduce a massively complex system to the mix.
- Freak_NL 4y agoFor all the money this system costs more than conventional off-the-shelf energy efficient bulbs, switches, and dimmers, you could hire a janitor's assistant to keep an eye out that the lights are off in the evening and turned on in the morning, and have a system that is maintainable with very little training, off-the-shelf replacement parts, and which will work for decades. But the smart system they installed came with a contract that said it would be more efficient, show proof of green credentials, and that the responsibility for solving issues lies with the contractor, so in abstract business logic it made more sense.
- samwillis 4y ago> you could hire a janitor's assistant to keep an eye out that the lights are off in the evening and turned on in the morning This is ultimately the biggest failing, and what makes this so sad. For a fraction of the cost of this system you could employee someone and have this as part of their responsibility. For automation to make sense, it can't just replace at the same cost (and certainly not cost more), it needs to be an order of magnitude saving. They may have done the math on this over say a 30 year period, but these systems never last that long. I imaging the "half life" of a IOT system is about five years.
- omegabravo 4y agoControl systems often last decades, longer than most employees. I've recently worked on a control system that is at least 30 years old. While you can't get the exact part any more - you can still get compatible replacements that drop in. There are still staff that are competent working with the platform. They should be upgrading over the years, unless you think working with a MS-DOS computer would be advisable today. Most education sectors use a large vendors control system with either vendor engineers, or local contractors.
- donatj 4y agoHonestly, even today I would trust a system running MS-DOS far further than anything running Windows. The number of gas pumps I’ve seen blue screened and kiosks running Windows Update… The only thing a more modern computer buys you is added complexity and more to go wrong. More RAM than your process needs? More to corrupt. What percentage of crud/resident processes on a “modern” is even related to the task we are assigning this machine? Less than 1%? It’s absurd. It’s like buying a Swiss Army knife with a million attachments to build a house. You can, but you shouldn’t.
- nicolaslegland 4y agoJob titles of the 21st century: Reverse engineering bounty hunter.
- Nextgrid 4y agoIf the school has IT-related classes it would be a good opportunity to let them have fun reverse-engineering and building a replacement controller for it. As a bonus it would cost no money and they'd have the source code of the new control system forever.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoDuplicate, although this one is gaining more traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34440005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34440005
- xnorswap 4y agoThis is why it's so important to have public contracts drafted and reviewed by experts. The original contract should have provision in place that the system be maintained, that the school be notified in any change in parent company ownership, etc. It would then be much easier to compel the company to do the replacement and if necessary sue them to recover the $1.2m cost. The issue isn't just one of a technological solution inferior to old fashioned manual lights, it's that public bodies get hoodwinked into contracts that are unfavourable. There were similar stories from the era of mass-PFI in the UK, with stories about how teachers weren't allowed to change lightbulbs but had to pay a maintenance company £50 to do so every time a bulb went. Public bodies rushing to accept contracts thinking that suppliers have their best interests in mind is horribly naive.
- bushbaba 4y agoYou mean like how google is inserting chromebooks into education for a loss, to one day raise prices at the detriment of education facilities who bought into the google classroom offering. Color me surprised /s
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoIn the 2000s, my sister had to buy an apple computer or laptop because the college required it for education students. This is a result of apple donating computers to school in the 80's. Google, really, is just following other people's example.
- yardie 4y agoApple never donated computers to schools. There are thousands of them. The company would go bankrupt in no time. What they did have is a company like MECC who wrote a lot of great Edtech software for Apple and Mac computers. That relationship with education and creators helped carry them out of the pre-bankruptcy days. School districts always had a budget in mind and traditional Apple would try and meet it. Now, they don’t even try. Just knock $100 off and call it the education edition is about as far as they are willing to extend.
- newaccount74 4y agoI've never seen a "smart" lighting system that was meaningfully better than a light switch. Every place I've been to that had fancy ways to control the lighting was just annoying. In school and uni teachers had issues dimming the lights, people who have smart lights at home can't figure out how to turn on/off some of the lights, you can't turn off flickering lights because they are motion activated... My favorite "smart" solution was a light that went out while you were sitting on the toilet, because the timer was set to a minute or so, and the motion sensor to activate it was outside the stall... Just use normal light switches, if something goes wrong everyone can look up on youtube how to fix them in 10 minutes.
- imgabe 4y agoYou literally can’t. Some form of automatic lighting control is required by code in most commercial or public buildings.
- yencabulator 4y agoClearly there aren't huge consequences for breaking that rule, considering this school...
- imgabe 4y agoThey had a compliant system that stopped working, that's not the same. If you didn't design it to comply in the first place you wouldn't get a building permit.
- Zaiberia 4y agoI see you too studied at the IT University in Copenhagen, Denmark ;-)
- GTP 4y agoHappens also at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Nederlands ;)
- 4y ago
- moss2 4y agoLess code is better than more code. No code is even better.
- DarknessFalls 4y agoIs it truly not possible, despite the original owners changing hands, to locate the original source for the control system and modify it? Furthermore, they said that they attempted a patch. Would this be feasible in more adept hands, with someone experienced at reverse engineering?
- cube00 4y agoThe linked student article covers that. Gaining access to the software that runs the lights is one of the main reasons why the lights can’t be adjusted correctly. “[5th Light] no longer has any of that information. They don’t have the software,” Cenedella said. “The old information is proprietary, so they wouldn’t originally give it to us. Now, they say that they don’t have it and that it’s unavailable." https://minnechaugsmokesignal.com/1894/news/whats-wrong-with-the-lights-draft/ https://minnechaugsmokesignal.com/1894/news/whats-wrong-with...
- d_tr 4y agoThe lack of a manual override is not the pandemic's fault. The problem is that the system is stupid.
- GTP 4y agoWhen "smart" switches turn dumb and you can't turn them off manually because they think to be smarter than you. On a more serious note, when designing a system it's very important to consider the failure modes of such system, and having lights that can't be turned off manually on case of failure isn't a good fail mode. I would call this a bad design.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gus_massa 4y ago> “I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands,” Osborne said. > “After many weeks of effort, we were provided a rough estimate in excess of $1.2 Million to comparably replace the entire system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in an Aug. 26, 2022, response. Let's say $3,000 per month, so 1,200,000/3,000 = 400 months = 33 years > The original high school building, which dates back to 1959, was replaced with the current 248,000-square foot structure in 2012. So the current system has only 10 years.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mmcgaha 4y agoYet when an amateur throws it together we get https://www.engadget.com/2015-06-14-amiga-controls-school-district-hvac.html https://www.engadget.com/2015-06-14-amiga-controls-school-di...
- soundmasterj 4y agoOh no, when will the children sleep
- hasbot 4y agoI obviously don't know any of the technical details, but I'd think they could, section by section, replace the failing automated system with the standard manual system (i.e. light switches) for a lot cheaper and less effort than getting a new server, etc. When I was a janitor in a middle school, every section of the building was assigned to a different janitor. After a janitor cleaned a room in the evening, they turned off the lights. The teacher or whoever using that room the next day turned on the lights when they arrived. Automating such a simple task was insanity.
- jt2190 4y agoSome great details provided by a student reporter: > Edward Cenedella, the Director of Facilities and Operations for the Hampden Wilbraham Regional School District, says that the issue is more complicated than just a computer server problem. > When the high school was rebuilt in 2012, an energy conservation software was added which relied on a daylight harvesting system for the lights to use daylight to equalize the light in the room. Cenedella estimates that there are about 7,000 lights in the building, all of which individually send information through wires to a computer which determines how much light to keep that particular one on. This system is owned by a company called 5th Light. > “On occasion, the software would go down and it would somehow get corrupted. We would try to recycle it and eventually everything would come back on,” Cenedella said. “Unfortunately the last time it got corrupted it was unfixable.” > Gaining access to the software that runs the lights is one of the main reasons why the lights can’t be adjusted correctly. “[5th Light] no longer has any of that information. They don’t have the software,” Cenedella said. “The old information is proprietary, so they wouldn’t originally give it to us. Now, they say that they don’t have it and that it’s unavailable.” “What’s wrong with the Lights?” Lilli Degrande, Minnechaug Smoke Signal (November 2021) https://minnechaugsmokesignal.com/1894/news/whats-wrong-with-the-lights-draft/ https://minnechaugsmokesignal.com/1894/news/whats-wrong-with...
- acidburnNSA 4y agoOld proprietary software, everyone's favorite. Next time they should just use Home Assistant or some other open system so they don't have to rely on the continued existence of the maintainer.
- yencabulator 4y agoIn the Home Assistant world, the thing that is inaccessible here would likely be a proprietary box controlling a bunch of relays and LED dimmers, that stopped responding to its network API.
- Nextgrid 4y agoIt would be very easy to replace a relay box though. It would probably cost less to use a bunch of off-the-shelf relay boxes and Home Assistant than pay the new company for whatever they’re trying to do. Better yet, it’s something the school’s technology-focused classes can do as a project.
- jinto36 4y agoReminds me of this article: "1980s computer controls GRPS heat and AC" About a single Amiga controlling HVAC systems for 19 public schools. https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/1980s-computer-controls-grps-heat-and-ac/ https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/1980s-computer-cont...
- marmetio 4y agoI suspect that the problem is patchable by any PLC consultant, but maybe not cost-effective since the issue is costing only a few thousand extra per month.
- Scubabear68 4y agoNot surprising at all. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but nearly all school boards in NJ are run by non-paid citizens who run for office with no experience in business or education. The result - if you look at school contracts, they are paying outrageous rates with no safety net compared to regular businesses. In our district they are spending $300k on simple pole barns and $50k on simple score boards because industry knows school boards have no clue on actual costs of goods and services. With amateurs running the show, it is not at all surprising that they flubbed negotiations for a service like this.
- jjk166 4y agoThey say they looked into having timers or switches installed but that it didn't prove feasible. I don't think they tried very hard. There's still a physical wire running through the wall to the light. You put a manual dimmer switch downstream of the smart controller's output and it will just work like a regular dimmer switch. Any electrician can do it. Even in the worst case scenario where they need to run some additional wiring to put the switch in an appropriate location, you're talking maybe $400 for a few hours of labor per room worst case scenario. More realistically with a bulk rate it's probably closer to $100 per room. I don't know how many rooms this building has, but it's probably in the dozens, certainly not thousands. Again, worst case scenario you don't need to add switches for every room, it's okay if some of the smaller rooms with fewer lights stay on, and work can be done progressively to keep costs down and minimize disruptions. I wouldn't call it cheap or quick, but it would definitely be much less than $1.2 Million and 2 years.
- gus_massa 4y agoThe article says 1200 students. Let's put 25 students per room, so there are 48 rooms. Add some overhead like an additional 50% for special rooms (like music of physics lab, the principal office), and an additional 50% for corridors and other stuff. Ok, 100 rooms. At $400 per room you get $40000, let's round it to $50000. They probably need a lot of red tape to approve all the modifications for a school, but I also guess they just don't want to drop the green-super-efficient-fancy-light-system.