Zorro_Returns

Zorro_Returns t1_j58c0ui wrote

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

Evidently, few commenters read the article, so...

The title is misleading. They are using circuit breakers, and/or removing lighting elements where they can. But it's obviously not a solution. Imagine if all the appliances in your kitchen were either on, or off, depending on a circuit breaker in another room.

The problem is that the software that controls the lights is broken, and evidently, they think they need "parts from China" to fix it, but it took weeks to find a guy familiar with the system.

That's amazingly fucked up. Software should not need "parts from China" to be fixed. Didn't they get any documentation with it? Hell, there are probably students at that school who could fix the software, but evidently nobody even knows that you don't fix software with "parts from China".

FWIW, there are some LED contractors that live near me, and I will ask the if they know about this case. Maybe they have some "parts from China". Lord knows, we Americans just aren't smart enough to make our own technology. /s

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Zorro_Returns t1_j58b41o wrote

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

Shutting off the entire system is not the problem. The article states they are using the breaker panels, but that's obviously not a solution. The title is somewhat misleading. They can be turned off and on, but they can't be controlled in a practical way.

Product does not work as advertised.

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Zorro_Returns t1_j589ef7 wrote

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

Have you ever tried controlling your home's electric devices from a breaker panel? Now imagine some 7,000 individual lights. 1) you don't have as much specific control, 2) it's a pain in the ass to walk over to a panel 3) how do you turn off "this" light, without turning off all the others on the circuit?

Anyway, the article states that they are doing that with some of the breakers, and removing individual lighting elements in some other fixtures.

Just because the article is dumb, read it anyway. People aren't as dumb as you wish they were :)

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Zorro_Returns t1_j588zoy wrote

Reply to comment by Altruistic-Tower-784 in The Lights Have Been On At a Massachusetts School For Over a Year Because No One Can Turn Them Off by AStartIsBorn

That's what they've been doing according to the article. Or physically removing bulbs. Yeah, it is dumb, but it's that's not going to be a feasible workaround. Having to walk down the hall and into a locked panel room to turn something on and off would get old fast. And you wouldn't be able to address specific uses, like you would with traditional switches.

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