A public high school in Massachusetts, USA, has been kept lit 24 hours a day for almost a year and a half because no one in the district can turn it off. At the moment, the authorities explain that it is expected that the lights of a secondary school can be turned off at the end of next month.
Minnechaug Regional High School’s lighting system was installed over a decade ago with the goal of saving money and energy, but the problem began in August 2021 when the software running the lighting failed. “It’s costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, assistant superintendent for finance at Hampden-Wilbraham Regional Schools, told NBC News.
The high school is faced with a major challenge: turn off the lights without unscrewing the bulbs or changing circuit breakers that leave entire sections of the building in the dark. Osborne estimated that the additional cost of keeping all the lights on is in the thousands of dollars a month, taking into account that it is a school with some 7,000 bulbs that light the almost 1,200 students of Wilbraham and Hampden daily.
A new piece of equipment was received and installed in October, the software was expected to have been updated last month, but was delayed. “At this point, it’s just the transition of the software that was lost in December and is now rescheduled for February,” Osborne said. Now, the actual cost of repairing the system by replacing the lighting panels and the server, while updating the software, will be between $75,000 and $80,000 (which equates to about $69,000 and $74,000).
Paul Mustone, president of Reflex Lighting Group, who now owns the company that originally installed the system in 2012, said they are ready to go next month and this time they will add a remote override switch so it won’t go off again. happen.