Five years of energy savings for All Saints Church with HeatingSave

Jon Brown, a Volunteer at All Saints Church, explains what the church needed:

"We wanted a system which took into account the heating characteristics of the building in which it was based and would therefore be able to work out how soon the heating needed to come on so that it would be up to temperature by the time it was actually occupied."

"Crucially, the control system needed to be available online, because we don't have people on site all the time. It is important to be able to check that the boiler's on, what's going on and what the temperatures are like in the different rooms — and also to be alerted to any issues."

"We also wanted to implement zones across the buildings so that each area, room or zone could have its heating independently controlled, and the system needed to be able to control a mixture of heating systems: underfloor, radiator, fan coil and discrete electrical heaters.

"The other crucial thing was having a system that could integrate with our booking system. That booking system is used for all the services that we have, the whole of the liturgies for each service, all the hymns, the songs, and whatever else that goes on, as well as for all the church activities and community uses of the buildings. We wanted to be able to effectively link the information from that into the heating system to control it and match what the needs were."

An ideal replacement Building Energy Management System

A further requirement for All Saints' new heating control system was that it needed to be a worthy replacement for a Seachange building energy management system that had previously been installed.

Following a renovation of the Church in 2010, which involved the installation of underfloor heating in the main church, the Seachange heating management system was fitted to cover the main church building, the main hall and the toilets.

Jon says: "That system had temperature and weather compensation, and it was capable of working out how long beforehand it needed to come on in order to get up to temperature, all those kinds of things."

This was a successful solution for six years — until the manufacturer went out of business. Then, a problem with one of the unit controllers in the church led to the disappointing realisation that there was now nobody to fix it. It was turned off and left alone, while a simpler system was set up in its place, which had time clocks but no advanced features.

The following year, Jon arrived at All Saints and realised just how beneficial the older system had been.

"I'm an electronics engineer by background and I was interested in the system they had. I looked up the details and realised that if this system worked, it would be vastly superior to anything that we had at that time. I put forward a proposal that we should put in place what had effectively been cut out — which is why we started looking at things like HeatingSave."

The HeatingSave energy management solution

The HeatingSave solution for All Saints Church considered all these needs, designing the system setup around the church buildings and their many uses.

As HeatingSave can integrate with existing heating systems, the HeatingSave engineers were easily able to connect it to the existing plant room equipment to control the heating and take over monitoring all alarms and warnings.

The All Saints site was divided into zones, with independent heating control for each zone provided using wireless Zigbee relays, temperature sensors and thermostatic radiator valves.

Range extender units were installed throughout the building to accommodate the stone construction and layout, ensuring the wireless signal from the HeatingSave base unit could reach the sensors and TRVs.

In addition, an energy monitoring unit was fitted to accurately keep track of energy use on the site, and the previous system and associated sensors were disconnected.

Finally, the HeatingSave web portal was set up for the church, allowing monitoring and control over the heating system from a desktop computer, on or off site. For additional convenience, the HeatingSave mobile app can provide the option to control and monitor the system from anywhere.

The important feature of integration with ChurchSuite was initially handled by manually exporting files from ChurchSuite and into HeatingSave. However, ChurchSuite has made a key change recently that will fully realise the integration with HeatingSave.

"When we put the heating system in, ChurchSuite really didn't offer any mechanisms for extracting data from the database," explains Jon.

"Recently, ChurchSuite has introduced a system whereby data can be extracted from the Bookings Module using API. This can be fully automated so that any change in the bookings is reflected in the heating data used by HeatingSave."

API is a type of software interface to allow computer systems to easily work together at the necessary points and are now a common way of exchanging data securely between systems.

Extending HeatingSave to new buildings

Since HeatingSave was installed five years ago, the Church has reacquired a building that had previously been rented out to a nursery school. Thanks to the nature of the HeatingSave system, All Saints has been able to extend control to this building using additional temperature sensors and a further range booster. In addition, Jon has temporarily removed units in part of the original hall which is due for extensive refurbishment.

Jon says this is thanks in part to the technical proficiency of Church members, but also to how the HeatingSave system is designed:

"We're not experts in the way that HeatingSave installers are, but we're capable of using the system and adding pieces in and taking pieces out and recommissioning things, without necessarily calling on the engineers to come down and sort things for us.

"This was quite important when choosing the system because we were aware that we would likely be wanting to change how the system operated, with room types and so on. Equally, though, where we're based it is quite expensive to get an engineer down to the depths of Devon in order to make any changes.

"We do value the HeatingSave Support Desk with the ability to call up and say, 'hey, look, we want to do this. What's the best way of doing it?' and they are able to come online and carry out basic changes or check the settings that we have on the system. However, being able to do some things ourselves works well for us, and it means that we can use the functionality of the system to its best.

"It says a lot about the system design that we can do this. The clever stuff is there in the software and the programming side of things, which we don't touch. But in terms of the fundamental function, to measure temperature and turn a valve to allow the heating to turn on or off, we're interested in being able to install that and connect it with the valves that operate in the church. We have plumbers come in and do the functionality side of that, as indeed we have electricians that come in and connect up the wiring. We can add a new valve or add a new temperature sensor relatively easily."

A comfortable outcome

In 2020 the Church of England voted to achieve net zero carbon by 2030, something that is frequently raised in relation to All Saints' energy use.

Jon comments: "All Saints Church is in the top 20% of Church of England Churches in the country in terms of high heating bills. This is mainly because we use the buildings every day of the week, both during the day and in the evenings, and because we currently use gas as the energy source. We have longer term plans to move to more sustainable energy sources — heat pumps and solar — however the use of HeatingSave, combined with implementing other energy-efficiency practices, has led to a significant energy saving for All Saints.

"We are using the buildings more efficiently than we were before," explains Jon. "When we book rooms, we try to use areas of the building that are already heated. We've also done things like pare the temperatures down a bit as well, by taking a degree off the normal room temperatures.

"Given that we're heating more buildings now than we were in 2021, when HeatingSave was installed, we're looking at around a 20% saving on our heating bill compared to then and a consequential reduction in our carbon footprint.

"We wanted a system which had the capability to heat rooms effectively and efficiently to create a warm, safe environment for people to come and use our facilities — something that works and is good for people, rather than being totally governed by the pound sign.

"That's one of the driving forces behind choosing a sophisticated system like HeatingSave — it benefits us all the way around."

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