The Replacements - S04E36 - A Day in the Life of Facilities Maintenance

We had a brown-out (insert poop emoji here) in our Modular building, and the LED flat panel lighting didn't like it at all! At the end of the day I ended up having to replace 6 of them.
Hi there, my name is Arne and if you're new here, I perform facilities maintenance at a multi-campus K-12 school in Langley, BC. With nearly 1300 students and 200 staff, three schools and various other outbuildings, there's always something to do.
I love my job; not only does the work I do benefit many, every day brings new challenges, which keeps me on my toes and in problem-solving mode.
Stay safe and be kind to one another!

[@phillipgroom9187]

What a job, but you were able to get it repaired. I think I would have been a little nervous with the students going up an down the hall running into the ladder. Good job ! Thanks for sharing ! Have a blessed day !

[@facilitiesmaintenancebyarne]

Thanks, Phillip! Amazingly none of them did! lol

[@SonicOrbStudios]

Ditch those stab connectors, they almost always fail with time, same with outlets and switches. Wago connectors are OK though

[@facilitiesmaintenancebyarne]

Appreciate the comment and 100% agree that the stab connectors on receptacles and switches are JUNK and should not be there in the first place. The draw leads to too much expansion and contraction which is why they fail. On the other hand, these turned out to be really robust, the draw for each fixture is light, and they took a lot of effort to push in… so I’m pretty confident they they will outlast the life of the LED panel itself. As for WAGO’s, I do like them when connecting different gauges (i.e. solid to multi-strand) but wouldn’t use them for standard wiring - I just don’t trust them yet :) Thanks for watching!

[@104silvae]

Bummer that all those went out so quickly. Something similar happened at my school.

[@Kevin-wj4ed]

Might be a bad driver

[@facilitiesmaintenancebyarne]

If it were just one that failed, with no apparent outside cause, I would agree with you... but because 6 failed at the same time due to an electrical brown-out, I wasn't going to spend time & money exploring what it would take to repair them. Time is money and sometimes it's more efficient to simply replace them.