Minnesota Regional High School
The lights at Minnechaug Regional High School in Massachusetts are always burning bright. They never actually go out. She can not Switch off. The smart lighting system for the whole building is broken and stuck in the “on” position. Apparently it has already been over a year nowand the electricity bills are really starting to pile up.
“We are well aware that this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the school district’s assistant superintendent of finances, told NBC News. “And we have done everything we can to solve this problem.”
The school’s entire “green lighting system,” some 7,000 lights, was installed over a decade ago and was supposed to save money, but according to the report, “the software it runs on failed on August 24, 2021” and no one was able to turn off the lights for the next 17 months. Teachers are adapting by unscrewing lightbulbs at the end of the day and throwing in some circuit breakers that aren’t connected to vital parts of the school. Dimming the lights to show movies or anything projected on a whiteboard has also been difficult: the lights are on full blast all the time.
News editor Lilli DiGrande, who writes for Minnechaug’s student paper, The Smoke Signal, did a great report on the situation a month after it started. The smart lighting company that installed the lights over 10 years ago, 5th Light, has apparently changed hands several times now and is currently owned by a company called Reflex Lighting. According to the Smoke Signal report, what’s left of 5th Light no longer has access to the old, proprietary software to fix anything, so “fixing” the system means replacing it with new hardware.
The problem with new parts is that this all happened in the middle of the pandemic and there is a massive shortage of chips, so the parts have been backordered and delayed several times. The process to repair the system was originally supposed to start in February 2022, but they are unable to get the parts. The next missed date was October 2022 and the school does not expect a repair until February 2023. The lights stay on.
A lesson in good smart building
Even if you’re not in charge of the lighting design of a giant building, here’s a valuable lesson for anyone involved in smart home/building technology: make technology a add on to your setup, not a dependency. You’ll still need to install physical light switches in each room, but as a bonus, you can choose light switches that can also be controlled over some kind of network. All sorts of smart light switches meet this requirement: normal paddles or even switches that can also be controlled via Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, probably Ethernet or whatever you prefer. This way, if the internet goes down, or a server explodes, or a cloud company shuts down, the lights will still work.
What you sure should not have to to do is wire the electricity to always be on and then hope that the network to the light fixtures or light bulbs will be nearby to turn them off. That apparently happened at this school, and now the taxpayer is paying the price.
