Member Article

Hall Energy & Security Management System makes national debut

Kington Langley Village Hall (KLVH) is a modern and well equipped facility situated on the edge of the playing fields in the Kington Langley village conservation area and conveniently located just 3 miles from Chippenham, Wiltshire.

KLVH was established as a charitable trust in 1963 to provide meeting facilities for villagers, but also rents out its premises to others as a way of generating income. Its main hall is a large flexible space, approximately 20m x 9m, that can accommodate 150 people at tables or 180 in close seating format. It also offers interested parties the option to hire the Committee Room, which is ideal for meetings and smaller presentations.

Kington Langley Village Hall’s Management Committee, through a Project Group, runs a continuous development programme that “centres on work to maintain the fabric of the building, to enhance the facilities and to improve our energy efficiency” said Peter Giles, the Head of the Projects Group.

Our HeatingSave reporter asked Dr Giles to provide some insight into KLVH’s energy saving initiatives. Peter, who has extensive experience in project managing multi-billion pound engineering projects, replied “Around 2 years ago, we conducted a thorough audit of our total operational costs and found that rising energy bills represented the single biggest cost we incurred.”

“We are a very busy village hall, as we host close to 1,000 booked sessions per calendar year. The interesting thing is that when we reviewed the hall usage information for 2013, we found that despite this the hall was only occupied for an average of five and a half hours per day. Our heating controls were a bit difficult to program so as to match the scheduled bookings. The meant that ultimately the heating was left on throughout the day, which was costing us a lot of money.”

Peter then explained that the KLVH Management Committee had already implemented an extensive range of energy efficiency measures. These included further insulating the main hall, installing solar PV panels and replacing the fluorescent light fittings with efficient LED panels. “However, we still had the problem of cutting our gas heating costs and that’s why we decided to install an energy management system.”

Finding a system that met the KLVH Management Committee’s requirements was not the easiest of tasks. In fact, when asked about KLVH’s decision to choose HeatingSave’s HESM, Peter said: “We reviewed several competing products, but none of them met our needs. Since the hall is run by volunteers, we wanted a system that would not add any extra work for us and that would integrate with our existing room booking system.”

“None of the Energy Management System manufacturers we contacted were able to deliver this sort of functionality at a realistic price - none but HeatingSave!“he exclaimed.

The HESM system manufactured by HeatingSave is a complete turn-key system that replaces your existing heating time clock to provide your building with an inexpensive all-in-one Energy Management, Room Booking and Security Access Control System.

Based on the HeatingSave Building Energy Management System, a Government-approved energy cost reduction system, HESM comes with loads of additional features delivering incredible value for money.

The built-in Room Booking Software, for example, offers exceptional functionality, as it allows users of halls and buildings to thoroughly control booking logistics, quotations, deposits, collection of monies and manage accounts using nothing more than their Browser and an Internet connection.

The system also incorporates a complete Smart Card-based Security Access Control System and provides support for smoke and fire alarms, a built in intruder alert system and the capacity to integrate seamlessly with existing Room Booking systems.

However, in the case of KLVH they already had an access control system for their front doors and an existing hall booking system. The key point of interest for them was the link between their existing hall booking system and HESM. Here, details for future hall bookings including start & finish times and the preferred room temperatures are passed via CSV data files in the middle of the night. These are then automatically processed by HESM to produce unique heating patterns for each day from hall booking information.

This means that the hall heating is perfectly matched to the hall usage, dramatically cutting heating costs - automatically turning down the heating when rooms are not in use.

The installation of the HeatingSave’s HESM was smooth and trouble-free. “I was thoroughly impressed with the fact that our bookings were loaded automatically into the software the morning after the system was installed and everything worked perfectly; right from the start. Very few systems work this well, right out of the box, without any significant tweaks.” commented Peter.

Peter Giles is confident that HESM will be able to drastically cut the Village Hall’s energy bills, “The HESM system combines the booking information with the highly sophisticated management software of HeatingSave to ensure that rooms reach the user’s preferred temperature just in time for their arrival and then maintain that temperature until the end of their booking, when the temperature is allowed to fall back to a frost protection setting. As such, I expect that we’ll be able to achieve at least 30% and we hope nearer to 50% savings on our gas bills!” said Peter.

Asked what he liked most about HeatingSave, Peter Giles replied: “Apart from its energy-saving features, I particularly like the excellent level of visibility it provides over the hall’s central heating. It can also be controlled remotely, so I can connect to it via the virtual private network I’ve installed between my home office and the village hall.”

“I also believe that it has the potential to be a “hands off” type of system,that runs completely by itself and requires little to no attention on a daily basis.” he added.

Peter’s verdict on the user-friendly nature of the HeatingSave system was, “The system itself is very easy to use and the software is clear and straightforward. In fact, I have never touched the keypad on the HeatingSave controller box ever since the system was put it and I don’t think I’ll ever need to.”

Peter told the HeatingSave reporter that he would gladly recommend the system to other village halls. In fact, he’s already done so, “A system that automatically links room heating to the bookings calendar is, we believe, a national first and I think everyone on the village hall scene should know of it. As such, I’ve already sent a press release out to the Wiltshire Village Halls Association and to ACRE (Action with Communities in Rural England), informing them of this development with HeatingSave and its enormous potential for saving on energy bills”.

Summing up his experience of HeatingSave, Peter concluded, “HeatingSave is a very promising solution to the problem of rising energy heating costs.”

Customer Information

Kington Langley Village Hall

Church Rd, Kington Langley

Chippenham, Wiltshire

SN15 5NJ

Phone: 01249750760

Email: pg@klvh.org

Web: www.klvh.org

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by HeatingSave .