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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

#101

Post by hasbot »

geraldwhen wrote: post #23
Freak_NL wrote: post #9

For 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 wi…

They likely could not hire a janitor. My school system routinely cancels busses because they don’t pay the drivers enough. Public institutions are unwilling to pay market cost for someone to show up for a split shift, which could be 80k/year or more.

Highly highly unlikely. If that were the case, the complaint would be the school is very dirty. I was a janitor for three years in a middle school. There were five people that came in every day after school and cleaned the building. Bathrooms especially need cleaning every day.

And, yes, turning off the lights were the responsibilities of every janitor. Each person had their own section and, after cleaning it, turned off the lights.

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#102

Post by tbran »

nanis wrote: post #83
xnorswap wrote: post #26

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…

> Public bodies rushing to accept contracts thinking that suppliers have their best interests in mind is horribly naive. "Public bodies" do not rush ... People who work there do. Those people really do not have that much of an incentive to be careful. They do not really bear the costs of their decision. They are also people, susceptible to having their decision influenced by whatever small or not so small immediate b…

Too balance this perspective, let's remember that not all public workers are bad people.

Many of them are also underfunded and understaffed, and don't have the lawyers and means of a rich corporation. The GP's "hoodwinked" was apropos.

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#103

Post by parker_mountain »

switch007 wrote: post #22
parker_mountain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went with standards based stuff, zigbee specifically. Matter/thread are the new standard that seems to stick. Basically, anything that doesn't require a specialized app to work, but rather a standardized protocol through a hub - and if the hub fails or sucks, you can replace it. Fortunately, it seems like the vendors are finally standardizing.

Standardising on Matter? What was wrong with Zigbee/Zwave? How long until another standard comes along :D

Thread is basically an evolution of Zigbee/Zwave, which both have been around for 20 years. Some of its key deficiencies include its routing, encryption, and meshing.

If we get another 20 years out of Thread/Matter, that's a pretty good outcome.

I will be slowly moving to T/M. My Zigbee hub is local only, and I have no reason to believe it won't continue to be stable.

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#104

Post by willcipriano »

tbran wrote: post #102
nanis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public bodies rushing to accept contracts thinking that suppliers have their best interests in mind is horribly naive. "Public bodies" do not rush ... People who work there do. Those people really do not have that much of an incentive to be careful. They do not really bear the costs of their decision. They are also people, susceptible to having their decision influenced by whatever small or not so small immediate b…

Too balance this perspective, let's remember that not all public workers are bad people. Many of them are also underfunded and understaffed, and don't have the lawyers and means of a rich corporation. The GP's "hoodwinked" was apropos.

Does any government agency claim to be funded correctly?

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#105

Post by hasbot »

I 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.

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#106

Post by pxmpxm »

nanis wrote: post #83
xnorswap wrote: post #26

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…

> Public bodies rushing to accept contracts thinking that suppliers have their best interests in mind is horribly naive. "Public bodies" do not rush ... People who work there do. Those people really do not have that much of an incentive to be careful. They do not really bear the costs of their decision. They are also people, susceptible to having their decision influenced by whatever small or not so small immediate b…

OPM culture

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#107

Post by jt2190 »

Some 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...

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#108

Post by cameronh90 »

mcv wrote: post #100
Symbiote wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have wireless light switches in my rented apartment, and I don't like them. 1. I can't see from the position of the switch the state of the light, so I still after 5 years press the wrong switch sometimes. 2. Sometimes, maybe 5% of the time, the light doesn't change instantly, but up to 2 seconds after I pressed the button. 3. About 5% of the time, the light doesn't change at all. Then I either think I've pressed t…

I also have a few wireless switches, and in some cases, the light doesn't immediately respond to a press requiring a few tries, and sometimes it doesn't respond at all. Could be distance, could be the battery is running out, but either way it's a problem I'd never had with regular light switches. At our last remodeling, I had some of them removed and replaced by regular wired switches wherever possible. Nothing beats…

Every light in my house is Hue, and all rooms have those Hue dimmer switches mounted over the normal light switch.

I absolutely love it. It's never been anything other than instantly responsive, works without the internet and I can turn all the house's lights off from my bed. Additionally, the utility rooms, hallways and bathroom lights are just fully automated so you never think about it. The regular switches are still there if you need them, but in over a year since installing it, I've not touched any of the traditional light switches.

My only issue is that the Hue Bridge has a maximum limit for the number of lights and accessories you can run, which I'm starting to get close to. The lights are also expensive, especially the low voltage outdoor lighting, so for that I just use a standalone ZigBee dimmer switch which integrates with the Hue system.

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#109

Post by shapefrog »

automatic6131 wrote: post #46
iLoveOncall wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just looking at the absolute nightmare that Linus from Linus Tech Tips (a popular YouTube tech channel) is going through with his smart house is enough to make it obvious that those solutions just suck.

If a highly consumer tech literate person with a near unlimited budget (either from freebies or business expenses or just because he's a multi millionaire) struggles with this stuff, you can be sure it's not ready for even enthusiast adoption.

> highly consumer tech literate person

Watching his videos on this subject I do not get the impression that he falls into this category.

Re: Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off

#110

Post by arp242 »

Symbiote wrote: post #73
woile wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of my sister installing an Alexa controlled light in the living room with no switch. My dad, who doesn't speak english, couldn't turn them on when he stayed there. I keep thinking turning on lights with a switch takes even less time than interacting with Alexa.

I have wireless light switches in my rented apartment, and I don't like them. 1. I can't see from the position of the switch the state of the light, so I still after 5 years press the wrong switch sometimes. 2. Sometimes, maybe 5% of the time, the light doesn't change instantly, but up to 2 seconds after I pressed the button. 3. About 5% of the time, the light doesn't change at all. Then I either think I've pressed t…

When I bought my previous house I changed to door to my bedroom to swing open the other way, as the original direction awkwardly swung open "in to the room" rather than towards the wall.

The downside was that the light switch was now behind the door, and because I didn't want to re-route the cables for for the light switch I used a wireless switch, which seemed like a good solution. It was, but I also had all of the exact same problems you have.

For "just a guy" like me it's still an okay-ish solution as routing cables through the wall is a lot of work (or fairly expensive if you have a professional do it), but I don't think anyone who has ever lived with these things actually likes them.

I apologize to whomever is living there now. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even realize it's wireless and were confused why it's such a shitty switch, and when the battery eventually ran out.

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