51–60 of 171 posts
Surely there is a circuit breaker somewhere.
You 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.
This 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 so…
You 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
This is a result of apple donating computers to school in the 80's. Google, really, is just following other people's example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering 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?
I’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-remot...
If you decide to have a lazy day and sleep in, you can turn it on when you wake up instead of potentially 2+ hours early.
If you have an unexpected overnight stop over somewhere (e.g. after a night out drinking), you can turn it off until when you're home again. Also works if you're taken to hospital.
There are many valid uses for it.
The people in that article you posted specifically signed up to an 'energy savers' scheme that explicitly allowed the energy companies to change their smart thermostat temperature. They agreed to it. There's no reason to think that energy companies would normally be able to take over your thermostat.
costs 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.
It 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
What are they paying the other 700k for?
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.
I'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 "sm…
I walk an and it's completely dark. I start looking for the switch and the light turns on automatically after a few seconds. I guess it's motion based.
I start to pee (this is a toilet, not a pissoir) and I guess I'm very still or what, the light turns off and it's of course pitch dark because I've closed and locked the door. So now I'm trying to jiggle left and right to turn on the light, but still keep my aim fixed in the bowl. Try doing that and you'll see how hard it is.
The light turns back on eventually. Complete disaster if you ask me.
Surely there is a circuit breaker somewhere.
You 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.
This 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…
I do also use some smart bulbs (also ZigBee/Zwave) and when paired with a smart switch, they can work in absense of the controller still, allowing you to still control the lights as long as the radios in both devices can reach eachother.
To me this is the common-sense answer. The design works in absense of any central controllers and definitely does not (ever) depend on any internet services, and yet you can still do anything you'd normally do (including integration into something like Google Home if you really want. Though, I don't care about "voice assistants" or anything, so it's not really that useful to me.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
This was obviously not a good system design, but a box full of relays and PLC controller cost a whole lot less than the all-in employer cost of an extra employee. They really should also be able to turn off the lights at the breakers unless they did something exceptionally stupid like put the fire control panels on the lighting breakers.
Why would you need an extra employee just to turn on/off the lights? I think janitors or teachers always did that as part of the job before smart switches came around, no need to hire some "light manager".