I'm no electrician, but wouldn't they have saved a lot of money by taking a pair of pliers to the wiring back in 2021 and adding a bunch of manual switches?
I'm no electrician, but wouldn't they have saved a lot of money by taking a pair of pliers to the wiring back in 2021 and adding a bunch of manual switches?
Cheaper to install, yes, but the idea was to save money by reducing energy usage. Honestly, they should have installed switches anyways; the article mentions that teachers were upset that they had...
Cheaper to install, yes, but the idea was to save money by reducing energy usage.
Honestly, they should have installed switches anyways; the article mentions that teachers were upset that they had no means to turn off the lights so they could use their projectors, and presumably this system didn't have a way for them to do that anyways. Realistically it should have been built with the light switch to override the automatic system even with the extra cost.
It's very clear this project wasn't thought through very well.
Motion sensor light switches are barely more expensive than regular switches and are used extensively (you've probably encountered them in restaurant bathrooms). With a single high school facing a...
Motion sensor light switches are barely more expensive than regular switches and are used extensively (you've probably encountered them in restaurant bathrooms). With a single high school facing a $1.2M cost to replace the current failed system with a new system (that'll presumably have the same problem in a decade) I'm doubting energy usage of even plain switches and some teachers forgetting to turn them off justifies the cost of these server based light controls.
Quick math from the article backs this up:
$1,200,000 to replace system with new one
System fails in a decade like the old one did, works out to a nice round $10,000 per month
“I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands,” Osborne said.
Max cost at present to leave all the lights on all the time is $9,999
Since no teacher, administrator, or other staff would leave every single light on every single day, the cost of the system doesn't seem to make sense. In fact, they'd save money by paying someone $5k per month to just go around at the end of the day and turn off every light. Sure, the cost to install probably wasn't $1.2M in 2012, but that's the cost to replace it and have it fail in a decade again now.
For hire: Minnechaug Regional High School Director of Lighting Technologies
Duties: Turn off all lights at end of the day
Hours: 7pm-8pm, M-F
Pay: $60,000/annually
I really hope it was a nice kickback check to whoever greenlit this "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist.
I was talking about having light switches in addition to the automatic lighting. I've actually seen working examples of the kind of lighting they were trying to get working at this school, and...
I was talking about having light switches in addition to the automatic lighting.
I've actually seen working examples of the kind of lighting they were trying to get working at this school, and they can actually produce savings. They actually have this working at my local Target, even. The idea is that there is light sensors nearby the lights they control that measure the natural incoming light so they can dim the artificial lights during the day because they are using windows, skylights, etc.
AFAIK almost all of these systems are proprietary (which makes them largely garbage IMHO), but there is living proof that they work in commercial buildings that are likely all around you.
The problem seems to be that the people in charge of vetting the contractors and their plans was monumentally incompetent. As likely were the contractors themselves. Like I said, the fact that they do not have light switches to manually shut off the lights is a really short sighted cost cutting measurement that makes life harder for the people who have to use that system. Even the lighting fixtures are stupid, opting to use bulbs instead of much more reliable and efficient commercial lighting fixtures.
This is just another case of giving the buying power to a person who doesn't have the technical knowledge to vet vendors, and so they go with whichever salesperson can tell the most appealing lies.
It’s only 7,000 lights, too. You could throw a commodity wireless controller inline with every fitting for $100k including labour. Not that I’m even saying that’s the right solution, it almost...
It’s only 7,000 lights, too. You could throw a commodity wireless controller inline with every fitting for $100k including labour. Not that I’m even saying that’s the right solution, it almost definitely isn’t, but it puts a broad price cap on any sensible refit cost. Then again, so does whatever it’d cost to just get any electrician to install a $2 switch in each room…
I’d really hope the $1.2M quote was just a “we really don’t want this job” number rather than any kind of serious suggestion, but given some of the shit I’ve seen over the years I wouldn’t take that for granted.
I’d be fascinated to know what the actual up front cost was, and what the hacked together fix came to in the end, but I imagine they’re not enthusiastic to release either of those figures.
I wonder if anyone actually did the math. Save a few dollars a day by investing in a million dollar complex lighting system. What is the payback time on that? Presumably they never made the...
I wonder if anyone actually did the math. Save a few dollars a day by investing in a million dollar complex lighting system. What is the payback time on that? Presumably they never made the initial investment back considering it only lasted 10 years.
The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.
“The lighting system went into default,” said Osborne. “And the default position for the lighting system is for the lights to be on.”
Osborne said they immediately reached out to the original installer of the system only to discover that the company had changed hands several times since the high school was built. When they finally tracked down the current owner of the company, Reflex Lighting, several more weeks went by before the company was able to find somebody familiar with the high school’s lighting system, he said.
Wow. Bespoke, presumably closed source, software to run a school’s lights sounds terrible. Just put every light on a sensor. No single point of failure for turning on and off.
Wow. Bespoke, presumably closed source, software to run a school’s lights sounds terrible. Just put every light on a sensor. No single point of failure for turning on and off.
not just that, but also running on specialized, non-commodity hardware: you could conceivably do a centralized control system like this effectively - but with commodity hardware and open-source...
not just that, but also running on specialized, non-commodity hardware:
the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation over the February break.
Osborne said they had no choice but to go back to Reflex Lighting and, with the help of the company’s electrical engineers, they came up with what he described as a “piecemeal” approach to solving the problem by replacing the server, the lighting control boards and other hardware.
Osborne and Provost also reported that “the remaining equipment has been back ordered multiple times” and the district was given a new delivery date of Oct. 14, 2022.
you could conceivably do a centralized control system like this effectively - but with commodity hardware and open-source software. and even then, as you said, you would want it to fail into a degraded mode that relies on local sensors & switches.
Laypersons seem to like bespoke proprietary systems. Maybe ideas of "tight integration", a "polished experience", and marketing materials win them over. That said, cost effective installation of...
Laypersons seem to like bespoke proprietary systems. Maybe ideas of "tight integration", a "polished experience", and marketing materials win them over.
That said, cost effective installation of LEDs in commercial buildings can be done with separated lights and drivers/controllers, rather than simply retrofitting LEDs into traditional sockets. So I doubt this school is alone in going with a silo provider who hides the complexity.
For that matter, Disney apparently contracts a proprietary pool water treatment company to monitor in real-time pools and water quality. They supposedly deliver small bursts of treatments to specific parts of pools at specific times to reduce the total amount of treatment and thus cost.
It’s less that being proprietary is an inherent problem, more that they didn’t ask the key question when they bought it: what’s the maintenance plan? Open systems have a distinct advantage in...
It’s less that being proprietary is an inherent problem, more that they didn’t ask the key question when they bought it: what’s the maintenance plan?
Open systems have a distinct advantage in answering that question, because there’s always the fallback of hiring a third party to figure it out. Proprietary systems can still have totally reasonable answers, whether that’s a maintenance contract, a transfer of documentation and keys or source code when it’s installed, some kind of indemnity insurance for the expected service life, whatever.
The problem arises when people install a proprietary system and then don’t bother asking what happens when it goes wrong, and what the contingency plan is if that happens when the supplier no longer exists. Those are both questions the buyer can ask regardless of the specifics, regardless of their own understanding, regardless of pretty much anything about the actual system, and still expect a comprehensible answer.
I agree. But it can also be the case that the proprietary system also has replaceable, serviceable parts; you don't realize until eight years on that a $30 standard part has somehow been improved...
I agree. But it can also be the case that the proprietary system also has replaceable, serviceable parts; you don't realize until eight years on that a $30 standard part has somehow been improved into a $110 part with a long fulfillment time.
Edit: either way, you are correct; the customer should be planning appropriately and asking questions
Yeah, I’d have more sympathy if it were just the global supply chain delays that hit them - another win for open and interchangeable parts with the benefit of hindsight, but even the best risk...
Yeah, I’d have more sympathy if it were just the global supply chain delays that hit them - another win for open and interchangeable parts with the benefit of hindsight, but even the best risk analysis might well have considered that unlikely enough to be acceptable - but the three months they spent hacking together a plan and even being told to scrap the whole thing suggests failure originally just wasn’t planned for at all, and that frustrates me a lot more.
Generally works best when you're a company with billions of dollars to throw at the problem. Less so if you're a school district having to go with the lowest bidder or people whine about property...
So I guess this sort of solution sometimes works.
Generally works best when you're a company with billions of dollars to throw at the problem. Less so if you're a school district having to go with the lowest bidder or people whine about property taxes.
Haha I'm getting a lot of responses. Personally I thought my statement was lukewarm enough to deliver this kind of feeling, but thank you nonetheless for your clarifier.
Haha I'm getting a lot of responses. Personally I thought my statement was lukewarm enough to deliver this kind of feeling, but thank you nonetheless for your clarifier.
I'm no electrician, but wouldn't they have saved a lot of money by taking a pair of pliers to the wiring back in 2021 and adding a bunch of manual switches?
Presumably when this new building was completed in 2012, it was cheaper to use light switches than have server controlled lights in the first place...
Cheaper to install, yes, but the idea was to save money by reducing energy usage.
Honestly, they should have installed switches anyways; the article mentions that teachers were upset that they had no means to turn off the lights so they could use their projectors, and presumably this system didn't have a way for them to do that anyways. Realistically it should have been built with the light switch to override the automatic system even with the extra cost.
It's very clear this project wasn't thought through very well.
Motion sensor light switches are barely more expensive than regular switches and are used extensively (you've probably encountered them in restaurant bathrooms). With a single high school facing a $1.2M cost to replace the current failed system with a new system (that'll presumably have the same problem in a decade) I'm doubting energy usage of even plain switches and some teachers forgetting to turn them off justifies the cost of these server based light controls.
Quick math from the article backs this up:
$1,200,000 to replace system with new one
System fails in a decade like the old one did, works out to a nice round $10,000 per month
Max cost at present to leave all the lights on all the time is $9,999
Since no teacher, administrator, or other staff would leave every single light on every single day, the cost of the system doesn't seem to make sense. In fact, they'd save money by paying someone $5k per month to just go around at the end of the day and turn off every light. Sure, the cost to install probably wasn't $1.2M in 2012, but that's the cost to replace it and have it fail in a decade again now.
For hire: Minnechaug Regional High School Director of Lighting Technologies
Duties: Turn off all lights at end of the day
Hours: 7pm-8pm, M-F
Pay: $60,000/annually
I really hope it was a nice kickback check to whoever greenlit this "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist.
I was talking about having light switches in addition to the automatic lighting.
I've actually seen working examples of the kind of lighting they were trying to get working at this school, and they can actually produce savings. They actually have this working at my local Target, even. The idea is that there is light sensors nearby the lights they control that measure the natural incoming light so they can dim the artificial lights during the day because they are using windows, skylights, etc.
AFAIK almost all of these systems are proprietary (which makes them largely garbage IMHO), but there is living proof that they work in commercial buildings that are likely all around you.
The problem seems to be that the people in charge of vetting the contractors and their plans was monumentally incompetent. As likely were the contractors themselves. Like I said, the fact that they do not have light switches to manually shut off the lights is a really short sighted cost cutting measurement that makes life harder for the people who have to use that system. Even the lighting fixtures are stupid, opting to use bulbs instead of much more reliable and efficient commercial lighting fixtures.
This is just another case of giving the buying power to a person who doesn't have the technical knowledge to vet vendors, and so they go with whichever salesperson can tell the most appealing lies.
It’s only 7,000 lights, too. You could throw a commodity wireless controller inline with every fitting for $100k including labour. Not that I’m even saying that’s the right solution, it almost definitely isn’t, but it puts a broad price cap on any sensible refit cost. Then again, so does whatever it’d cost to just get any electrician to install a $2 switch in each room…
I’d really hope the $1.2M quote was just a “we really don’t want this job” number rather than any kind of serious suggestion, but given some of the shit I’ve seen over the years I wouldn’t take that for granted.
I’d be fascinated to know what the actual up front cost was, and what the hacked together fix came to in the end, but I imagine they’re not enthusiastic to release either of those figures.
I wonder if anyone actually did the math. Save a few dollars a day by investing in a million dollar complex lighting system. What is the payback time on that? Presumably they never made the initial investment back considering it only lasted 10 years.
Wow. Bespoke, presumably closed source, software to run a school’s lights sounds terrible. Just put every light on a sensor. No single point of failure for turning on and off.
not just that, but also running on specialized, non-commodity hardware:
you could conceivably do a centralized control system like this effectively - but with commodity hardware and open-source software. and even then, as you said, you would want it to fail into a degraded mode that relies on local sensors & switches.
We need better engineering literacy. You don’t even need software skills to evaluate this. Just professional experience maintaining systems.
Laypersons seem to like bespoke proprietary systems. Maybe ideas of "tight integration", a "polished experience", and marketing materials win them over.
That said, cost effective installation of LEDs in commercial buildings can be done with separated lights and drivers/controllers, rather than simply retrofitting LEDs into traditional sockets. So I doubt this school is alone in going with a silo provider who hides the complexity.
For that matter, Disney apparently contracts a proprietary pool water treatment company to monitor in real-time pools and water quality. They supposedly deliver small bursts of treatments to specific parts of pools at specific times to reduce the total amount of treatment and thus cost.
So I guess this sort of solution sometimes works.
It’s less that being proprietary is an inherent problem, more that they didn’t ask the key question when they bought it: what’s the maintenance plan?
Open systems have a distinct advantage in answering that question, because there’s always the fallback of hiring a third party to figure it out. Proprietary systems can still have totally reasonable answers, whether that’s a maintenance contract, a transfer of documentation and keys or source code when it’s installed, some kind of indemnity insurance for the expected service life, whatever.
The problem arises when people install a proprietary system and then don’t bother asking what happens when it goes wrong, and what the contingency plan is if that happens when the supplier no longer exists. Those are both questions the buyer can ask regardless of the specifics, regardless of their own understanding, regardless of pretty much anything about the actual system, and still expect a comprehensible answer.
I agree. But it can also be the case that the proprietary system also has replaceable, serviceable parts; you don't realize until eight years on that a $30 standard part has somehow been improved into a $110 part with a long fulfillment time.
Edit: either way, you are correct; the customer should be planning appropriately and asking questions
Yeah, I’d have more sympathy if it were just the global supply chain delays that hit them - another win for open and interchangeable parts with the benefit of hindsight, but even the best risk analysis might well have considered that unlikely enough to be acceptable - but the three months they spent hacking together a plan and even being told to scrap the whole thing suggests failure originally just wasn’t planned for at all, and that frustrates me a lot more.
These pools are pretty large artificial lakes. We discussed it earlier.
I haven't seen any details of what this "technology" consists of.
Thanks for finding it. Edit: I dug around when that article first came up, but I never figured how the hell they were supposed to conserve water.
Generally works best when you're a company with billions of dollars to throw at the problem. Less so if you're a school district having to go with the lowest bidder or people whine about property taxes.
Haha I'm getting a lot of responses. Personally I thought my statement was lukewarm enough to deliver this kind of feeling, but thank you nonetheless for your clarifier.