This story has nothing to do with the Smiths (or maybe you guessed the BeeGees based on the partenthetical?), but I just couldn’t resist the headline. It does involve an actual light that never goes out, 7,000 of them in fact. This is costing residents in one Massachusetts town a lot of money.

For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because the district can’t turn off the roughly 7,000 lights in the sprawling building.

The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”…

“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.

The school system installed this computer controlled lighting system when the school was rebuilt back in 2012 and it did actually work for about 10 years. Then there was a power outage and since then nothing has worked. The high school newspaper first wrote about the problem back in November 2021. The article was headlined “What’s Wrong With The Lights?”

Since August 24th, all the lights in the high school have been on 24/7. They are stuck either all on, or all off because of a server malfunction that occurred after the power outage on the 24th. There is currently no manual way to control the lights other than a series of breaker switches that can only shut off whole sections. But why has the problem not been fixed yet?

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.

As the story goes on to explain, the company that created the proprietary software that runs the system says it doesn’t have access to it anymore. WCBV5 in Boston reports the school is looking for a fix but that won’t be cheap either:

One year after the problem began, staff was manually shutting off breakers to cut power to exterior lights and some bulbs were simply removed to keep them from burning power around the clock…

As they tried to find someone to repair the system, school officials discovered that the original installer of the system had been sold multiple times. The memo says school officials struggled to find someone at the new owner who was familiar with the system but were eventually given a “rough estimate” of $1.2 million to replace the entire system.

Other attempts to mitigate the problem included hiring a software consultant who was unable to develop a solution and engaging electrical engineers who identified a piecemeal approach to replace certain pieces of the system.

Even if you assume they are spending $5,000 extra a month to keep the lights on, the cost of replacing the system is about 20 years worth of that extra fee. In short, it’s going to cost a lot more to fix this mess than to just keep the lights burning at all hours.

All of this seems like a very expensive lesson in that old admonition: keep it simple stupid. I’m sure the idea of an energy saving, computer controlled lighting system sounded appealing back in 2011, but someone should have put a stop to it the moment the company mentioned the words “proprietary software.”

So there is a light that never goes out and the taxpayers in this unfortunate school district are stuck paying for it. As I said, this has nothing to do with the Smiths song but if you just want to hear it anyway, click here . And if a double decker bus, crashes into us…