Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
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.
This is a result of apple donating computers to school in the 80's. Google, really, is just following other people's example.
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.
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."
A quick google search will give you the "kids can't wait" program. This program allowed donated computers to go to 9000 California schools.
The others may have been discounted, sure, but they did donate and it still means that Google is just following in the footsteps of those before them.
I'll also note that $100 off of a current computer isn't as bad as it sounds, considering the low starting price of a good-enough-for-internet-and-school machine. I had green letters on a black screen back in the 80s, giving way to not-so-refined pixel art a few years later, all for a computer that cost more than they do now before you even adjust for inflation. Computers simply aren't the same sort of cost they were back then (they still cost, but the machinery isn't as big of an expense)
"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 benefit they can derive regardless of the ultimate cost to the people who actually pay for the consequences of their decisions. And, this is before one brings in the possibility of corrupt collusion between the people who spend other people's money and people who receive it.
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.
How about small towns entering into agreements with big box stores where they are simply unmatched and "hoodwinked" into accepting arrangements that aren't favorable. [0] Presumably, towns could make better contacts with better legal resources.
Do you have a better solution to this problem or should we just let the corps run our lives?
[0]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/3/big-box-stores...
[0] https://m.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel/videos
Note, however, that the state, in this story, that has underfunding problems and cannot figure out how to adequately supervise the civil engineering contracts is not California, it's Texas. Y'know, for all those who like to take sides on California vs Texas.
"This perspective" said nothing about "public" workers being bad and only referred to the implications of the incentives they have at scale.
You mean like how even the most minor stuff winds up getting reviewed by a PE firm to much expense?
>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.
They aren't stupid. Don't give them that easy out. They know the contracts are BS. They don't care because a) they can afford it b) every other municipality is signing similar ones so it's "industry standard"
> 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 way this usually works is the original company sells its useful assets and then goes bankrupt. Or goes bankrupt and sells its useful assets. You can't compel a company to stay in continuous operation, and if you pay for an established company to do the work, you'll get complaints about paying too much for the work, because they'll charge you more to cover for future things they're compelled to do because they actually plan to be around.
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.
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?
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...
The best argument would be the hypothetical remote control by a bad actor without any consent.
[1] what's curious about this particular story is how "intentional" this was; the report is vague and hints that some people were unaware exactly what they were opting into.
???
I think you immediately followed that up with more than one answer to that?
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 want to make sure the bathroom "zone" of my house is reasonably warm at that time; and that his room is a comfortable "sleeping with a blanket on" temperature, ready for him to go to bed at 7:30. (Just about every room in our house has a separate thermostat.)
But if I set my thermostat to 19C at 7pm, then it won't be 19C at 7pm -- it will start heating at 7pm, and reach 19C at some indeterminate point in the future. So I manually add my own "static fudge-factor" in, and set the thermostat to 19C at 6:30pm.
However, this "static fudge factor" is almost certainly to be ineffective or inefficient: It may hit 19C at 6:40, in which case I'm paying for 20 minutes of unnecessary heating (inefficient); or it may hit 19C at 7:10, in which case the room will be cooler than I want it to be at 7:00 (ineffective).
The claim of the "smart thermostats" I've heard is that you can tell it, "I want it to be 19C at 7pm", and it will figure out how long your particular room will take to heat (possibly factoring in the current temperature), and start the heating at exactly the right time so that it hits 19C right at 7pm.
Is that something worth having? I think so. Is that worth the extra cost and risk? I don't really think so, which is why I haven't installed one; but I can see why someone else would like it.
There's remote control, which is one thing. My Honeywell system can do that, but even if I don't connect it to the WiFi (and earlier versions required extra hardware) it'll still do smart local control. I lose weather compensation in that case, though, as it uses a remote forecast to predict future demand and not bother turning the heating on if it's not actually going to be needed.
The more important aspect of "smart" heating is proportional control and predictive heating. As you say, regular thermostats will turn the heating on when the temperature is below the set point, then off when it's above, with some hysteresis to avoid flapping. And one function of the smart system is to predict how early it needs to turn the heating on to get up to temperature in time. The Honeywell will also switch the heating off early if it's confident the temperature will drop by less than 0.5°C before the end of the set time.
Beyond that, though, the controller will modulate the boiler to maintain the set point -- heating systems term this "TPI", I assume it's not a PID controller because it lacks the derivative component. Time Proportional and Integral either (in my old house) controls the boiler modulation directly or (in my new house) turns it on for a few minutes in every time slice in an attempt to get the right amount of heat into the system to maintain the set point.
Where a system like the Honeywell really shines though is that I'm not turning the whole house on or off -- I've smart TRVs on each radiator, so I can have heat in my office during the day and in the lounge in the evening and not have to keep rooms warm when I'm not using them. Having recently moved house and consequently had a few weeks without the smart system I can attest that it really does make a big difference.
The term for this control theory operation is called "Bang bang". The basic logic is "Turn on if under set point, and turn off if at or above set point". Ovens and cheaper HVAC heating controllers use this extensively.
You do see a bit of hysteresis, since it's goal is not to be under the point, but overshoots are definitely a thing. And since it's a simple instantaneous decision (unlike PID), it's also pretty simple to make very cheaply.
The Honeywell system I have seems to have gained extra derivative-based functionality recently too, which is nice :).
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 efficient.
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.)
I'm not sure how, but our smart thermostat intuits this to adjust to our comfort, not just a temperature.
Because of our climate, it's also convenient to program our fans to run at certain intervals, control for a set point for humidity, or to base behaviors off of other sensors (air quality, etc). Conditioning air isn't just for maintaining a temperature, and most traditional thermostats, while not ineffective, are completely unable to account for these things.
In my case though I'm using Home Assistant on a local server and Tailscale for remote access, so nothing is connected to some company's online service and the actual devices are all offline only.
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.
“Customers said they had unknowingly agreed to let companies raise the temperature to save energy.”
If your position is that you could never mistakenly click the wrong button or check the wrong box, how is it possible that you could ever be so careless as to not accurately predict your temperature needs?
That, and it sensing if you're home or not, are what makes it useful.
I keep thinking turning on lights with a switch takes even less time than interacting with Alexa.
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 the wrong switch (see 1), or I have to turn around, walk back and try again.
I think the benefit is for the company who built the apartment, since they saved a few crowns not needing to run wires near the doorways. There is no benefit to the occupant, only problems.
At least the batteries in the switches are still fine.
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.
Did you remove the actual switch?
It is a little bit bulky due to the nature of it but that's not something that bothers me. If you're particular about your interior design, you may need to look elsewhere: there are also complete light switch replacement products that are thinner and look a bit sleeker, but I haven't felt the need to move to those.
Another thing I like about the Hue system is I had so much difficulty finding reliable combinations of non-smart dimmer switch and LED light. Despite spending a lot of money to get supposedly high quality LED compatible dimmers, one would break every few months and occasionally they seemed to cause my LED lamps to burn out or have other weird issues like not completely turning off. All dimmer switches I tried had a subtle buzzing at certain light levels too.
It's possible there is some combination of lights and dimmers that works great, but since switching to Hue, it's the first time in my life where my lighting system has required zero maintenance in over a year. Other than when a squirrel bit through my garden string lights...
You leave the toggle switch in the On position and mount this on top of it. Very clever.
https://tweakers.net/productreview/292224/philips-hue-dimmer...
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.
It's odd to me that it's the norm for the seller/buyer of the house to never meet. I bought a 1970s house awhile ago, and have slowly learned it's eccentricities as well as adding some myself. I think it'd be immensely helpful if it was the norm for everyone to walk through the house together and cover things like "oh this is a weird miscellaneous circuit that covers things in 3 different rooms", "this is this way because..."
Watching his videos on this subject I do not get the impression that he falls into this category.
I think the one that shows the most glaring issues is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkAiXzKOTNY about his smart lights.
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.
Zigbee's fine, but it's dated.
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.
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.)
... until you hit that bug that tells all the lights in the school to turn off about 100 times a second.
It's inexpensive and easy to install. The most important feature is its REST API, so you can control it any way you like if you don't like the official app.
Almost makes you wonder whether the school would be better off with a consumer grade system.
And a server owned by Jesus McJesusFace in WhereTheHellistan propped up by shitnickles funds.
Just no. A simple physical switch works every single damn time without external dependencies. Perfection is simplicity, not complexity.
Oh, and as an extra: That simple switch still works.
No you don't. Just use Home Assistant or openHAB — fully local control by default. I've been using the former for a while now, and it's been working great.
To be fair to Nest, newer versions are able to do this but many heating and cooling systems don't expose those functions on a standards compliant open way. As a result, a vast number of heating and cooling systems runs about 10% less efficiently than they should but there's really no way for end customers to know that since they don't have a reliable benchmark to compare against.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 should be automated and what should be kept in human hands. I think we as a civilization need to sort out what the costs and opportunities are in light of the failure modes of both alternatives.
MS-DOS doesn't even have a networking stack by default, so it's air gapped out of the box. That in case you're worried about security.
Other than that, if you can control some relays from an esp32 with 4k ram, why wouldn't you be able to do it from an 8088 box with 64?
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".
(Any teachers that want to use a toilet after 5pm will need a smartphone app installed.)
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?
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.
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.
Kids doing light chores aren't going to remove the need for a cleaning crew.
And your article agrees:
> Japanese schools have non-teaching staff called yomushuji [...] their main job is cleaning and maintenance.
My worry is that there would be problems with getting such a person.
Unemployment in the US (and quite a few other regions as well) is currently low, and "janitor's assistant" doesn't sound like a particularly glamorous career.
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.
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.
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.
Had two places where i was regularly going out get stingy with the toilet light timer. One fixed it after I (and probably a lot of other people) complained. The other was still too short last time i've been there.
For me that's basically the definition of good automation. If its really good you don't engage with it at all. The lights come on when people want lights, they turn off or dim when they want less light. The heating keeps things at a comfortable temperature. The unfortunate thing is that a bunch of vendors have come along and because its easier rebranded "automation" to mean "awkward light switch which requires having a conversation with a computer".
How do you imagine that to work?
I prefer the lights off, my coworkers want the lights on, so when I'm alone I leave the lights off, when the others come into the office they turn them on. This situation is very easy to deal with because fortunately we have normal light switches in the office.
There is no way that automation could improve this situation, unless they install cameras with facial recognition to see who is in the office today and send everyone questionnaires to ask about their preferred lighting levels.
My apartment building has this, and it's better than needing to press a button while carrying shopping bags etc. Visitors also don't need to work out which button to press -- I once rang someone's doorbell, thinking the switch would turn on hallway lights.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
Better yet, it’s something the school’s technology-focused classes can do as a project.
With amateurs running the show, it is not at all surprising that they flubbed negotiations for a service like this.
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.
It's only tripping the breaker that requires a replacement after a few cycles.
But I agree some organizations will prohibit staff from touching the breakers.
> when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.
Whatever energy savings they are getting from that system, it doesn't seem to be enough for it to pay for itself.
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?
I doubt they have 7000 bulbs on blutooth.
> “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.
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.
Furthermore, they said that they attempted a patch. Would this be feasible in more adept hands, with someone experienced at reverse engineering?
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...