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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

#111

Post by acidburnNSA »

jt2190 wrote: post #107

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…

Old 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.

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

#112

Post by briandear »

samwillis wrote: post #12
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…

> 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…

> you could employee someone and have this as part of their responsibility

Someone that calls in sick. Forms a union. Demands high wages for menial tasks. We need far fewer government employees.

Why not literally just ask the first one in and the last one out to handle the lights? This isn’t complicated. Someone locks the doors right? Can they not turn off the lights?

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

#114

Post by throwaway4aday »

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…

This seems to reveal that the problem with automated lights, etc. is that we no longer have a single source of truth for the state of the light or other device. I think the problem is that we are updating the state of the light but not updating the state of the UI i.e. the switch. The solution would seem to be that the automated system should be moving the switch in order to turn the light on or off instead of adding another point of control like a relay that changes the meaning of the switch position. I'm sure this would add cost to the system but I think the benefit in usability would outweigh it. The perfect system for me would be a smart switch that is electromechanically actuated by the smart system but also has an override switch that you can toggle in order to prevent the automated system from moving the switch. That way you can still maintain full control, the switch always indicates the correct state and you have all the benefits of the smart system.

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

#115

Post by daniel_reetz »

somethingwitty1 wrote: post #90
yardie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple 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…

My school had donated Apple computers. Edit: And they apparently are even today: https://www.apple.com/connectED/index.html "We’ve donated an iPad to every student, a Mac and iPad to every teacher, and an Apple TV to every classroom."

Mine, too. In a rural area in the Midwest in the 80s.

http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple

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

#116

Post by briandear »

pjmorris wrote: post #49
omegabravo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control 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.…

> Control systems often last decades, longer than most employees. ... > I've recently worked on a control system that is at least 30 years old. I've met many people who are much more than 30 years old :) And I've worked in places where people retired only after ~40+ years. And replacements are relatively easy to find, depending on the nature of the work. I think there is a reasonable debate to be had about what shoul…

[flagged]

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

#117

Post by briandear »

stepbeek wrote: post #34
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…

And have that employee be a part of the local community, rather than funneling money off to a distant corporation.

[flagged]

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

#119

Post by derenge »

cameronh90 wrote: post #108
mcv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Could you elaborate more on how the dimmer switch covers your normal light switch? From the product page it looks like the dimmer has a flat back.

Did you remove the actual switch?

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

#120

Post by gwd »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #97
gwd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? I don't use a smart thermostat, but what's told to me is this. With a "timer" thermostat, you tell the system when to start heating ; but what you really want to tell the system is when you want it warm . For example, we regularly give my son a bath between 7 and 7:30, so I wan…

Didn't this used to be solved by the simple and incredibly efficient method of having a bathroom heater? One thing I don't understand about Nest et al is - virtually no houses have actual zone cooling or heating. So when we say "make bathroom 21c at 8pm" we are actually saying "heat up entire house until bathroom is 21c at 8pm". Turning on electric heater in bathroom for 30seconds seems incredibly more convenient and…

> Didn't this used to be solved by the simple and incredibly efficient method of having a bathroom heater?

Bathroom heaters don't heat instantaneously; so you either have to remember to turn it on manually (introducing your own fudge factor, as described above), or start your bathing process with a colder-than-you-want room.

> One thing I don't understand about Nest et al is - virtually no houses have actual zone cooling or heating.

UK regulations require individual rooms' temperatures to be able to be set individually. For most people, this can be done with a valve on the radiator; these valves can be "smart" and integrated into the whole "smart heating" system. For underfloor heating, this typically requires an actual wall thermostat in every room -- which is what I've got. :-)

(Hence why I also want to let the temperature in my son's room drop during the day when he's not there, but come up to 17C in the evening so he's reasonably warm under a blanket.)

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