we have discovered an incredibly weird and somewhat concerning bit of wiring in my apartment

theres this weird ceiling light in our kitchen thats never worked in the months we've lived here, earlier today the power went out and when it came back on, this light turned on on full brightness

there is no light switch that could control this light, although there is a switch on the other side of a wall that is completely coming out of the wall and doesnt work

phenomenal

wait are most of your light switches variable brighness

this light is some sort of really bright LED setup, and the like transformer in the middle is uncomfortably bright

oh no

i dont think theres a single dimmer switch in this apartment

also, before this this light wasnt off, it just produced an incredibly dim amount of light

what

that is so fucking strange

the circuit this light is on (as well as several other whole rooms of this apartment) are not controlled by any of the four switches on our circuit breaker panel

if it's in the kitchen maybe the switch is hidden in a cupboard or something?

oh

have you had prior outages that haven't turned it to full power

i dont think theres been a previous outage in the time weve been living here

and im pretty certain theres no way a switch could be in our cabinets, we'd have seen it

there is a slight possibility that it could be the broken switch, but the positioning doesnt make any sense

yeah

@des54321 see if maybe the brightness control is something you're supposed to get at with some smart home setup somehow

we dont have any kind of smart home thing

the previous tenant could have

and i can see the circuit board on the transformer thing in the light, theres not much on it but some capacitors

oh boy

@RadvylfPrograms is there any chance you have any idea what this is

because this seems like something you'd either have some insight into or be even more baffled by

whenever you wake up lmao

when my dad called our landlord about this earlier today he barely even knew this light we were talking about existed

wow

so we have an incredibly bright and overly blue-white light in our kitchen we cant turn off

oh yeah it oneboxes that

yep

@des54321 Do you have anything that measures voltages?

If you do, check any random outlet immediately.

Have you had things like toasters cook slower or faster than expected?

It could just be a wonky LED bulb or some wiring that inconsistently connects (which would also be a problem, and potential fire hazard), but my initial thought when I hear "some lights way too dim and some too bright" (although in this case, the same light) is a lost hot leg or neutral.

There's three wires that go into a house/apartment in the US: two hot and one neutral. The two hots are 180° out of phase, and connecting them gives 240v for things like air conditioners. Both hots are 120v to the neutral, and are used for outlets, lighting, and most other stuff. If you lose one of the hots going into the building, half of the circuits in the house won't work, but then once an oven, air conditioner, or other 240v load is on, they'll start working again at lower power.

It sounds like it's just this light though, so you could potentially have that at a smaller scale.

E.g., the neutral or one hot going to a single circuit is either broken or intermittently disconnects, which can cause all sorts of fun stuff like this.

@des54321 That wouldn't be to code either, so I wouldn't expect one to be

What could be happening is that you have something called an MWBC (multi-wire branch circuit), and the neutral has broken. That creates a sort of mini-lost-neutral scenario, where the voltages will fluctuate wildly on that circuit depending on what's using power on it (so maybe the power outage knocked out something else that was on the circuit, and now this LED's getting a bigger chunk of the voltage)

IIRC every apartment is required to have its own breaker panel...oh wait just saw your message that it's not controlled by any of the breakers you have. Odd that there's only four, and odder that none control it. So now I'm even more confused.

I think it'd be cool if computers had an FPGA built-in, sort of like a GPU. So a program could include instructions to configure the FPGA, whenever it needs to do a bunch of repetetive computation.

From a google it seems like there are actually PCIe FPGAs, and some newer server processors integrate FPGAs in the same way they use caches (so the programmer doesn't choose what gets FPGAified), so maybe that's the future

@RadvylfPrograms pretty certain we dont have a voltmeter in this apartment, and i'm pretty sure everything else has been operating normally (although right after the power came back on the breaker for the outlet our microwave is plugged into kept flipping, but its working fine now)

the most confusing thing is that this light working again was almost certainly triggered by it losing power briefly, as im certain it was always powered before, it just wasnt working

I guess it could also just be a broken switch and a wonky lightbulb

my theory is that constantly being on for like years overloaded the bulbs transformer somehow, and losing power for like half an hour let it discharge or something so it could work again