Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

AStartIsBorn OP t1_j56fqiw wrote

Reply to comment by GoArray in The Lights Have Been On At a Massachusetts School For Over a Year Because No One Can Turn Them Off by AStartIsBorn

Designed to save energy and money by defaulting to always on. Interesting.

39

Thriftyverse t1_j56wo33 wrote

It's a design flaw, sure, but for the design they did, it makes sense to default to 'always on'.

If default was 'always off' then there would be no way to turn the lights on at all. Which would mean lights out until a service tech could get out there.

Having it be 'always on' means you can still use the breakers to turn them off, so at least there is a way.

33

needabiggerhammer t1_j571uop wrote

Yeah, that is just a safety thing. Don't want the system going out and leaving everyone in the dark. Esp. if it went out because of an emergency.

17

Thriftyverse t1_j57e7db wrote

And it's good that they bothered with safety, because they didn't really think all of it through when they designed it.

5

OAMP47 t1_j588xro wrote

That suddenly triggered a decade and a half old memory from my time renting in college. Scheduled maintenance of the blocks' power grid. My apartment was accessible from an interior hallway on the second floor with no windows. Coming home from grocery shopping that was the day we all discovered the emergency lights in the building didn't work and it was pitch black trying to feel the way up the stairs and to anyone's unit door.

2

GoArray t1_j57czwn wrote

Spot on, one (shitty) caveat though. Had they defaulted to always off, the issue probably would have been addressed almost immediately.

Folks can live with too much electricity, shut it off and all hell breaks loose.

8

Thriftyverse t1_j57ehpa wrote

Yeah, at always off they would have fixed it, but probably not added a manual override. Just repaired and sent out the same way.

2

Morat20 t1_j570wy8 wrote

Auto-on makes sense for lights. If there's a failure, it's nicer if you can see what you're working on.

And doubly so for a building that likely has plenty of fully indoor rooms, with poor to nonexistent natural lighting, so if the system breaks and it defaults to off you have a bunch of people in the dark trying to get out.

Like any of the school theaters or band rooms in my HS back in the day would have been pitch-black nightmares. Of course people have phones now which help, but you really don't want to depend on whomever is suddenly in a pitch-black room having their phone on them.

26

biggsteve81 t1_j58bzq8 wrote

Even more serious, imagine if the bathroom lights all switched completely off.

5

Mend1cant t1_j58meqs wrote

Been there before. Motion sensor was set way too short on the shutoff. Couldn’t get an angle from the stall.

6

AStartIsBorn OP t1_j5769il wrote

You make an excellent point. However, maybe the lights shouldn't be set to full-blast as the default mode. For instance, emergency lights (at least ones that I have encountered), don't offer as much light as normal lights, but enough to make things comfortably visible.

3

Morat20 t1_j57nfqi wrote

Right but in this case default isn't "we don't have power" (emergency lights are battery powered for that reason) it's "The control system is totally not working, our software is borked, what's our failure state".

I mean if it's going to be a few days to get fixed they'll want to be able to still use the building!

10

atomicxblue t1_j5br6kl wrote

I'm curious why their system didn't connect to an inexpensive light sensor on the roof or something to control the lights in the event of a default state. At least they'd only run half of the time.

3

AStartIsBorn OP t1_j5c5hz2 wrote

Someone else replying to me said, in effect, that it wasn't anticipated the default state would run for so long. Sounds like somewhere along the line, they didn't think this all the way through.

Edit: Punctuation.

2