E.A. Tailby benefits from greater heating control with HeatingSave

Stephen Tailby is the fourth generation of the Tailby family to oversee the manufacturing business, and has been part of the company for nearly 50 years. He realised that the business needed to have greater control over the heating of the building, but this came with several difficulties.

Challenges of heating a Victorian building

The first concern for energy efficiency was the construction and age of the building itself, as Stephen explains:

"The building has been in the shoe industry since 1890; here we are, 130 years later, and it's still standing.

"However, Victorian factories were primarily made to let in the maximum light that they could for working; they weren't made for keeping the place warm or cool.

"The building measures about 20,000 feet across three floors. It's like a three-sided box, and the rooms are long and narrow, as Victorian factories were, probably about 30 feet wide and 200 feet long, with big glass windows down each side.

"The building is listed, so the windows cannot be changed to make them more efficient because they have to look the same on the outside. We could put secondary glazing on the inside, but that isn't ideal because they're big windows — maybe two and a half metres by three metres — and in each wing there's probably ten of these down each side.

"It also has a slate roof about a century old, so that is not insulated particularly well."

In addition to restrictions imposed by the building itself, E.A Tailby is only one of several businesses that make use of the building, and some of the others have different working hours. This means the heating system needs to be on for longer to accommodate everyone in the building. Stephen says:

"We are on the bottom floor; the middle floor I rent out to a gym, a dance school and a magazine publishing company, and the top floor I rent out to a dance school, a judo club and a martial arts club.

"We have vacuum CAD cutting machines that emit warm air, so for us manufacturing on our bottom floor, it's absolutely fine — we almost generate our own heat.

"But for the gym or martial arts, they don't want it to be too hot, and the wings where they are sitting down at desks all day they find it colder. I have had a bit of a tussle between what we settle on, and I think we settle on somewhere in-between.

"It's varied use obviously means that the usage of the building changes. As a manufacturing company we only need the heating on during the day, but because of the nature of these other businesses they need it more at evenings and weekends."

The final challenge for improving the building's energy efficiency lay with the existing heating system, which was very basic and had limited control. Stephen describes the difficulties it poses:

"We have two large gas boilers and a very ancient hot water radiator heating system which heats the entire building. Unfortunately, this doesn't allow the building to be zoned, which would be much more efficient. The whole building is either on or the whole building is off.

"We have to heat the building from six in the morning when we start on the ground floor to probably ten o'clock at night, when the classes in the other wings finish.

"The system was running on a very basic time clock with a thermostat in one part of the building, like something you'd have in your home — and it wasn't like a modern time clock where you can change the temperature within certain bands of the time. It was on or it was off.

"It used to come on at something like five o'clock in the morning and go off at nine o'clock in the morning, and then come on again at about four o'clock in the afternoon and go off about nine o'clock in the evening."

Fortunately, HeatingSave can retrofit to any type of heating system, including those with multiple boilers, so when Stephen went looking for a way to better manage the heating for his building, he decided that HeatingSave could help.

The HeatingSave solution

The limitations of the building and the heating system meant that Stephen primarily wanted his new Building Energy Management System to be able to more accurately control when the heating turned on and turned off. This would aim to reduce the time the boilers were active unnecessarily and therefore cut energy use.

The HeatingSave Heat Loss Algorithm is designed exactly for this purpose. It automatically calculates a heat loss profile so it can apply heating/cooling at the most efficient time and monitors internal and external temperatures to adjust timings based on both historical data and current data.

Stephen explains how the HeatingSave Heat Loss Algorithm better manages the heating in his building:

"My staff start at half-six in the morning, so I need the temperature in our factory to be a certain temperature by 6:30 in the morning.

"With the aid of various thermostats and temperature sensors around the building — I think there are a couple outside and two or three around the building inside — the HeatingSave system learns when it needs to turn the boilers on to create that temperature at that time. For example, if it's 10° outside it might need to come on an hour early; if it's 5° outside it might need to come on an hour and a half before that. It works that out.

"Obviously some portions of the building are warmer than others, some are draftier than others, but I know that it is going to be a certain temperature at a certain time because the software within HeatingSave has worked out what time it needs to turn the boilers on to get them to that temperature at that time.

"Then it also knows what time it needs to turn the boilers off at night. If the last person leaves at ten o'clock at night, we don't need the boiler to still be going at that time. We want that last person to get to ten o'clock and notice that it has started to get a bit colder, because the boilers actually turned off at probably eight o'clock to save the gas, but the residual heat in the building has kept it warm enough until that time.

"That's basically what I bought it for."

The importance of customer aftercare

Following the installation of the HeatingSave system, the age and construction of the building continues to intrude on its operation, requiring Stephen to contact the HeatingSave Helpdesk for assistance.

"I probably have a conversation with the Helpdesk each year because the HeatingSave system runs on Wi-Fi," says Stephen, "and our office is at the other end of the building to the boiler house, probably 150 metres away, through thick walls.

"I'm pretty sure that when I go to fire the system up this year, the software won't be able to find the control panel in the boiler house because it hasn't been used for months over the summer. I will probably have to ring Anton on the HeatingSave helpdesk and he'll be able to tweak something and then we're away. The helpline has been very good."

The helpdesk is available for all HeatingSave customers and aims to provide the same high level of service to all of them. Some customers will benefit from an annual maintenance contract, which can help to limit unexpected costs and provide a safety net should anything require additional work.

However, for Stephen, his HeatingSave system is effective and reliable enough that he feels confident with not having a maintenance contract.

"I don't pay for the care package because I don't think there is any need. I had a discussion with Anton and we decided that if it's only going to be one call a year, I would rather he just tell me how much it is, and we just pay on the spot when we need to."

HeatingSave delivers real results

Despite regularly monitoring his building's energy use over several years leading up to the installation of HeatingSave, factors such as the turbulent global energy situation, increasingly severe winter weather, and the construction of the building itself have meant that Stephen is unable to determine exactly how much HeatingSave has helped to reduce his energy use.

"Every year is different. It is extremely difficult to monitor how much you're using, how much heat you're leaking out; this building leaks heat like a sieve. You could put a furnace on inside it and within two hours you wouldn't know."

However, Stephen's primary purpose for installing the HeatingSave system was for better control of the building's heating, which the Building Energy Management System has given him:

"The system probably hasn't really been changed much since it was installed because our requirements haven't changed. I don't want to be looking at the temperature every day thinking I need to turn it up because it's a bit cold, or turn it down because it's a bit hot.

"HeatingSave is providing everything that I wanted it to do, with very little hassle."

Part of this improved control that Stephen highlights is that the heating can be programmed to switch off on specific days:

"I like the ability to turn it off on, say, Christmas Day, when I know there is going to be nobody in the building at all. I can just program it to not come on, so I don't need to be here."

In addition to the desktop interface that Stephen uses, HeatingSave offers a mobile app to monitor and control its Building Energy Management System remotely, providing further convenience should it be required.

"I've not gone down that road at all," Stephen says. "Maybe that is something that I ought to do, but maybe I don't need to — I'm here all day every day anyway!"

"It's done everything I've asked it to"

Stephen is satisfied that his HeatingSave system is providing the service for which it was intended, and recommends that other businesses look into fitting a Building Energy Management System in their own premises. His experience with HeatingSave has been positive from the start:

"I found HeatingSave to be very, very helpful at the time and that's why we chose them," says Stephen. "The system has done everything I've asked it to do, and once it's been put in, that's it, you don't even need to look at it again.

"I've had it for 10 years and it's been working fine. I think that's a good recommendation, isn't it?"

Find out how HeatingSave can help to better manage your energy — discuss your own requirements with our experienced team.