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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

Surely there is a circuit breaker somewhere.

From the article:

> 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.

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.

Most circuit breakers that you’ll find on lighting circuits are designed for switching duty of modern lighting loads. Circuit breakers so designed will have an “SWD” printed in them (“switching duty”)

Since you can turn off the lights with a normal switch every night and morning, I’m inclined to say you can do the same with an entire circuit.

Circuit breakers are not designed for many cycles.

For flipping a breaker they are rated for thousands of cycles.

It's only tripping the breaker that requires a replacement after a few cycles.

Well, I can’t speak to the school of course, but mine are.

The lighting and sockets should be on separate circuits.

Yes, but now you're redesigning a normal electricity setup for a large building like a school. This is the system that was, presumably, replaced by the broken IoT system, plus the absolute minimum of traditional kit outside of that.

They are designed for that https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/21685/does-turning-c...

But I agree some organizations will prohibit staff from touching the breakers.

Several answers on that page suggest that daily operation of circuit breakers is not harmless.

Circuit breakers are designed to be flipped thousands of times. You can most certainly flip a circuit breaker every night and every morning for years. It's tripping a breaker that you don't want to do very often.

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