Advent candles vs lights out in work

Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Many Christian churches will have celebrated by lighting one candle in an Advent wreath holding four (or five including an extra one for Christmas Day) this morning.

(Even some of the normally candle-phobic Protestant denominations will have got their matches out this morning!)

Ironic then that in this season of light and Christingles that our floor in work has been without light for over a week. Only six years old, our building has a lighting management system.

A fancy way of describing a PC that sits in-between the light switches and the light fittings in the ceiling. So when you press the light switch, you actually send a signal to the PC that decides what to do to which set of lights (turn them on, dim them etc).

Why bother you ask? Well it allows rules to be set that switch off all the lights after 7pm when most people have gone home, or to turn on the lights in the corridors when someone walks past the sensor in the light above the door.

However, when the PC fails, it can leave two half floors without any light! And given the dark mornings and failing light from mid afternoon, it’s fairly gloomy!

So until the suppliers can send someone across from England to sort it out, we’re left with the kind of floodlights normally found on building sites strung around the window sills and on tripods. They’re hugely inefficient, and give off a lot of heat, so any savings made by the intellident lighting management system over the last six years have probably been cancelled out by the extra load on the air conditioning and energy inefficient bulbs in our new yellow friends.

And yes, someone has to go around and turn off the lights at night.