The owner reported the OUTPUT_CLAMP notification as a persistent
annoyance on the live install. It re-asserted every 30 s, all day.
⚠️ THIS IS A REGIME CHANGE, NOT A CHANGE OF MIND ABOUT THE ALARM. 30 s
was chosen when a loop-side engagement was rare - clamp.py's own note
records "60 cycles of the §10.3 runaway produce 2 loop-side engagements".
The live install produced 48 IN 25 MINUTES of ordinary operation, because
`max_w` is 5000 W where the loop's tuning was derived at a 1500 W clamp
(SAFETY-39). The integrator therefore reaches its bound constantly and
the alarm narrated it every 30 s. An alarm that speaks that often about
the normal case is how an operator learns to ignore the one that matters,
which is the exact failure clamp.py's docstring is written against.
⚠️ 150 s IS THE REQUIREMENT'S OWN EDGE WITH ONE STEP OF MARGIN, not a
comfort choice. test_clamp.py part 2 pins the cadence in WALL-CLOCK terms
rather than against this constant: a loop pinned on the rail must speak
at least MIN_PER_QUARTER = 5 times inside the 900 s quarter that bills
the capacity tariff. That caps the constant at 900/5 = 180 s. Measured:
180 s -> 5 alarms per quarter (exactly the required 5, no margin)
150 s -> 6 alarms per quarter
300 s -> 3, and the floor check goes RED
180 s would sit on the boundary, so any later change to the firing logic
would tip it red for a reason unrelated to that change. The FLOOR is the
thing that must not move, and it does not.
⚠️ WHAT THIS DOES NOT DO. It changes how often the alarm repeats. It does
NOT make the alarm correct: the message still calls the integrator bound
a BUG SIGNAL and still pairs a request from one moment with a `self.target`
read at another. That is SAFETY-40. And it does not stop the loop railing
in the first place; that is SAFETY-39. This is a stop-gap and says so at
the line.
Nothing was suppressed: every engagement is still counted, the action-log
row is unchanged, and the §10.3 runaway still raises the alarm - an
earlier attempt at this that split the alarm so only `clamped` notified
was REVERTED because test_clamp.py:398 proved it would have disabled
runaway detection entirely (a runaway presents as `i_clamped`, and
control.py:78-81 says `clamped` is unreachable on a default install).
Full suite: 20 passed, 0 failed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BwRLw7eKYj2byVdwB6kbjU
