Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
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Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#2The New Math of Dependency: $1,200,000 divided by 1200 students = $1000 per student
Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#3costs 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.
Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#4I really want to see what horrible complexity they concocted to ruin the simple lightbulb (see https://twitter.com/internetofshit for more terrible 'IoT' ideas)
Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#5This 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.
Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#6[deleted]
Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#7Surely there is a circuit breaker somewhere.
Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#8There 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.
Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#9For 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.
Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
#10This 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 N…
Electronics hobbyist magazines of the 70s and 80s are full of better Nest replacements.