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 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.
> 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 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.
There was an article here on HN some time ago about some enormous project in California (a bridge? a tunnel?). IIRC the state's engineering department was quite small and underfunded, and so they depended on the contracted company for their engineering expertise. This did not go well. As I recall, the problems were that the state engineers were not experienced enough (because private pays better and seniors leave) and there weren't enough of them. For the life of me, I can't remember what the project was, but maybe someone else here does.
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?
It's just highly suspicious that every criticism of government ends up at "You don't pay us enough money" especially in the United States. It's never incompetence, corruption or malfeasance, the solution is always hiring more of the people who made the mess in the first place and paying the existing ones more.
Alternatively, there is room for "incompetence, corruption or malfeasance" AND being underfunded or understaffed. I don't think there are any absolutes here.
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.
You mean like how google is inserting chromebooks into education for a loss, to one day raise prices at the detriment of education facilities who bought into the google classroom offering. Color me surprised /s
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 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)
They don't even have to raise prices. Keeping a generation locked into Google products could turn them into the Microsoft of the next generation of office workers.
> 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 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.
> This is why it's so important to have public contracts drafted and reviewed by experts.
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"
This is fundamentally why I'm so sceptical of putting "smart" control equipment into my home. It's very expesive to fit in the first place, and then there is the incredibly high chance it will become redundant or unmaintainable in the next 5 to 10 years. You just won't see the payoff in that time.
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.
Smart equipment is fine as long as the "smart" part is just synchronization built on top. I have ZigBee and Zwave (yes both for now unfortunately) switches and dimmers, these work completely fine manually in absense of home assistant.
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.)
You can unplug the controller if need be, but truth is that if we're talking about ZigBee or Zwave, I don't think there's nearly enough bandwidth to do that :)
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 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 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 the user experience of direct interaction with a system.
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.
There are a few options on the market depending on where you are. The specific product I have seems to be out of manufacture now but the replacement is the Samotech Hue Switch cover SM200 V2. It fits over the top of your existing light switch and the wireless dimmer attaches magnetically. If you need to turn off the light completely you can pop the cover and access the switch underneath.
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...
If you’re happy with your smart setup it’s trivial to remove the existing switch, connect the wires directly and put a cover on top, then attach the wireless switch to it using adhesive/Velcro.
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.
But that adds yet another point of failure, and something with mechanical parts is probably going to wear out much quicker. And if it fails can I still flick the switch, or do I need to replace it?
The manual override switch I mentioned should disable the smart control completely. The switch would have to be designed to work without the smart control in the first place which would mean it would still work when the smart control was disabled or malfunctioning.
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.
> 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..."
It's a cover-your-ass move. The seller's agent explicitly tells the seller that they shouldn't answer any questions directly, because saying the wrong thing could create a liability. Admitting awareness of a problem can be used against you.
That’s why I swear by Shelly modules. They’re small relays meant to be installed behind the original light switch and accept an input from it - this means you still retain the functionality of the switch, but get network-based control as a bonus. Should the network go down, the physical switch still works and it’s acceptable for rentals because you don’t even have to remove them as they still behave like a normal switch if the controller is unavailable.
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.
Thread has IP-based routing, can use 6LoWPAN, has a simpler gateway implementation in border routers, and they've separated out the application layer into Matter to allow for easier interoperability and evolution.
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.
Matter is in many ways a meta-standard. The transport layer may well be remain as Zigbee or Zwave, but by having at least the controllers supporting Matter you get interoperability between different protocols, rather than having to go all in on a specific one.
I used to have a huge aversion to any kind of smart control, but the new generation of home automation (2010-now or whatever) is fundamentally different from the kind of 80's and 90's domotics that we all have vague memories of. Older systems (like the school system, probably) relied on an expensive central panel and wiring and accessories that were potentially tailored to that particular system, and if something went wrong you were totally out of luck, and only the installer could make changes or apply fixes. But now, all you need is mains power and a smartphone, Hue lights default to working like a regular light if something goes wrong with the Zigbee bridge, Shelly switches can be added onto regular switches so that it's just something on top of exactly the same tactile interface you already had, and so on and so on. And if all of it does mysteriously fail and you need to replace it, a new set of 10-20 light bulbs and some smart relays would set you back no more than a couple hundred dollars / euros.
Almost makes you wonder whether the school would be better off with a consumer grade system.
I mean, if that’s what you want, sure. Or, as parent said, you could go with local control. The choice is there, if you really think McJesusFace’s server is great, go for it. Personally, I prefer not relying on any outside server and having everything locally and still get all those smart features.
Oh, and as an extra: That simple switch still works.
> And a server owned by Jesus McJesusFace in WhereTheHellistan propped up by shitnickles funds.
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.
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.
Just looking quickly at one video where he had trouble with heating, they seem to use, lets say, not exactly finished products. Instead controlling things via Home Assistant. Which does not to me scream having lots of money, even is he has that. I believe there are much more expensive and more ready-made systems than what was used there.
I think you're talking about the latest one where he's mining bitcoin for heating. I haven't seen that video, but there is a playlist of 30 videos about his new house, and a lot talk about different smart-home aspects which are top of the line and yet just don't work.
Considering parent, myself and most people I talk to consider the point of Nest being the ability to control their thermostat when they are out of the house, I don't understand how any system in the 70s or 80s could even work at all like a Nest, let alone better.
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?
> 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 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.
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 efficient.
> 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.)
Right; I was born in Europe and per-room heating was the norm; but I've lived in North America for last 30 years, and this is apparently still not something we have figured out - in Canada, vast majority of houses have central furnace with central fan. I've had several HVAC professionals come and despite my "Shut up and take my money!!!" attitude, basically none of them wanted to even bother giving me a quote to install something smarter and more granular (and why would they, when they can make good honest living doing routine work swapping furnace and AC control boards etc).
Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a place in the US where you could control individual rooms. With forced-air heating, it seems like all it would take would be a way for the room thermostat to open and close the vent.
The two elements of "smart" are often combined, but there's no need to have both.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's the non-smart behaviour -- TPI stands for "Temperature Proportional and Integral" and is the basic behaviour to try to automatically modulate the heating output to maintain the set point without overshooting. While PID is "Proportional Integral Derivative" which is a step smarter again.
The Honeywell system I have seems to have gained extra derivative-based functionality recently too, which is nice :).
Because humans perceive temperature in terms of radiant heat, perceptual comfort is different from gauge temperature.
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.
I rigged up a homemade remote controllable thermostat thing years ago, with the single killer app: I don't know exactly when I'm coming back after 1-2 weeks at the parent's, and I'd like to turn on the air conditioning or turn up the heat, as applicable, before getting into the car to drive back.
If you get stuck in traffic on the way home from work, you might have your heating on for an extra 30+ minutes unnecessarily.
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.
The second bullet point under the title of this article is
“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?
I have a system with the capability. It's quite convenient for dynamic on/off. E.g. instead of having a timer I turn on the heating when I wake up from bed, and if I go home I put it on before leaving or while underway.
Being able to do things like change it based on certain conditions, like switching it off if I open a window and not activating it if I'm away from the house over the time it would normally turn on. I can also remotely turn the heating up when I'm heading home, so the place is warm when I arrive.
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.
I'm not sure how intentionally[1] opting into an agreement to have your thermostat remotely controlled is an argument against having it connected to the internet.
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'm not sure how intentionally[1] opting into an agreement to have your thermostat remotely controlled is an argument against having it connected to the internet.
???
I think you immediately followed that up with more than one answer to that?
Users being stupid and not reading what they are signing up for is not a argument against connecting the thermostat to the internet, and hypothetical bad actors are just that, "hypothetical". If you'd linked an article demonstrating concrete proof I'd accept it as an "argument against connecting one’s thermostat to the internet".
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.
Earlier generations of Nest didn't have proportional control capability of any kind, no ability to apply Load or Temperature compensation either which are things that less polished looking heating and cooling control systems have been able to do for decades.
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
Most education sectors use a large vendors control system with either vendor engineers, or local contractors.
Honestly, even today I would trust a system running MS-DOS far further than anything running Windows. The number of gas pumps I’ve seen blue screened and kiosks running Windows Update…
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.
> 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 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.
This was obviously not a good system design, but a box full of relays and PLC controller cost a whole lot less than the all-in employer cost of an extra employee.
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.
> but a box full of relays and PLC controller cost a whole lot less than the all-in employer cost of an extra employee.
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".
Having read most of the comments debating the pros and cons of the system this is an astonishingly simple solution! Sometimes I think those of us in technology look for problems to solve.
> 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?
This seems like the problem to me. Staff at the school would have probably turned off the light in their classroom at the end of each day regardless, but no credit is given unless you add this system which does the same thing for more money and probably more emissions.
> 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
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.
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.
Kids aren't going to operate a commercial floor waxing machine.
Kids shouldn't be responsible for hygiene of toilets or kitchens.
Kids shouldn't have access to stronger cleaning products.
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.
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.
I've never seen a "smart" lighting system that was meaningfully better than a light switch.
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 remember stopping at this gas station a few years ago and using the restroom.
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.
There are loads of examples of smart lighting systems that are more efficient than a light switch. You didn't notice them, because the lighting was doing exactly what you expected it to. You only notice the instances where the system is badly calibrated or had a poor control system and it annoyed you.
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".
> The lights come on when people want lights, they turn off or dim when they want less light.
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.
They had a compliant system that stopped working, that's not the same. If you didn't design it to comply in the first place you wouldn't get a building permit.
Motion-activated lights in corridors, hallways and stairwells seem fine.
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.
They say they looked into having timers or switches installed but that it didn't prove feasible. I don't think they tried very hard.
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.
The article says 1200 students. Let's put 25 students per room, so there are 48 rooms. Add some overhead like an additional 50% for special rooms (like music of physics lab, the principal office), and an additional 50% for corridors and other stuff. Ok, 100 rooms. At $400 per room you get $40000, let's round it to $50000.
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.
There should be some culpability and at the very least reputational damage for whoever decided to install such a system in the first place. I’m guessing it was the architect.
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.
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.”
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.
In the Home Assistant world, the thing that is inaccessible here would likely be a proprietary box controlling a bunch of relays and LED dimmers, that stopped responding to its network API.
It would be very easy to replace a relay box though. It would probably cost less to use a bunch of off-the-shelf relay boxes and Home Assistant than pay the new company for whatever they’re trying to do.
Better yet, it’s something the school’s technology-focused classes can do as a project.
If the school has IT-related classes it would be a good opportunity to let them have fun reverse-engineering and building a replacement controller for it. As a bonus it would cost no money and they'd have the source code of the new control system forever.
Not surprising at all. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but nearly all school boards in NJ are run by non-paid citizens who run for office with no experience in business or education. The result - if you look at school contracts, they are paying outrageous rates with no safety net compared to regular businesses. In our district they are spending $300k on simple pole barns and $50k on simple score boards because industry knows school boards have no clue on actual costs of goods and services.
With amateurs running the show, it is not at all surprising that they flubbed negotiations for a service like this.
> 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”)
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.
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.
It costs millions to replace the entire system which may or may not be done since they are working on a fix.
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
> “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.
> “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.
When "smart" switches turn dumb and you can't turn them off manually because they think to be smarter than you.
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.
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."
I really want to see what horrible complexity they concocted to ruin the simple lightbulb (see https://twitter.com/internetofshit for more terrible 'IoT' ideas)
I suspect that the problem is patchable by any PLC consultant, but maybe not cost-effective since the issue is costing only a few thousand extra per month.
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.