Since then, the Community Centre has been refurbished and modernised, and there are over 80 groups and independent organisations using the centre's rooms and facilities. Suffice to say, Burnham on Sea Community Centre faces unique challenges with regards to how they heat the building, and what they can install to help.
In 2023 when David Norton was the Treasurer of BoSCC, he was looking over the finances. "I couldn't work out why our bills were so high," David explained. "This is an interesting building; it's an old Victorian house. We've got 14 rooms that are heated. It's not like a conventional community centre with a big hall for playing badminton in, a bar, and a couple of other rooms."
BoSCC was also using "… a sort of paper and spreadsheet system of booking and it was not working particularly well. So that's why we went to Hallmaster and then that prepared the way for us to then be able to go on and do the controlled heating because what you didn't want to do is have the job of every week setting the heating up". HeatingSave "… just pulls everything from the bookings."
It turned out that the central heating system had one control that was either on or off. "It was switched on when it got a bit chilly in October. It wasn't switched off until the end of April when it got warmer." This meant that from October till the warmer Spring months, the centre was constantly being heated, all day and all night. "You could come down on a weekend when there was nobody in the building and the whole of the building would have been heated. It was craziness. We wanted to do something about that side of the system and make it much more efficient. So that's where HeatingSave came in, because each room now is in its own zone and is only heated when the room is booked."
David told us how the initial system design was going to be a hybrid system. "When we upgraded our heating system, we made a hybrid system rather than just gas. We put InfraRed (IR) heaters in our main rooms. On a cold day, the gas would boost the heating up and when it got to temperature it would be maintained by the IR separately."
When the refurbishment was planned, it was split into two phases. The first phase dealt with the HeatingSave installation, roof renovations and solar installs, and IR heating installation. The second phase, which begins next month, doubles the Centre's solar panel count, hopefully including a battery to store the excess energy. David said that ideally "we will need to get the IR to be separated from the gas". This would allow the gas to heat the room during the day and if the evenings became chillier, the IR heating could come on. These would be powered with stored energy from the batteries and then using off-peak power. "So it's trying to make what we've got now as usable and economic to run as we can". While this hasn't been implemented yet "… the system just works, when the gas comes on so does the infrared but it does make the room very warm very quickly so we've been able to switch all that down quite quickly to keep the rooms to the right temperature."
The BoSCC had investigated several alternative systems, including a heat pump installation. However, David talked about why it would not have been viable for them. "A heat pump system here for this sort of building would be a very invasive process and we'd have banged through holes in all sorts of places. It would've been major engineering work to get it up and going and then running it wouldn't have been economically viable." He later explained that while their HeatingSave system had cost around £12,000, the quote for the Heat Pump installation had worked out as over £90,000.
HeatingSave has wired and wireless options, which means that buildings with complicated layouts or that wouldn't do well with an 'invasive' installation process can still have a HeatingSave system, like at BoSCC. David added: "We've been lucky to do it as a package, so that our booking system, the HeatingSave system, and the solar system all work in tandem together."
David also explained how he was able to view how energy was coming and going throughout the building. "One of the things I noticed was that sort of throughout the night there was a slight blip where you could see that kilowatts were being drawn down from the grid and we tracked that down to when the boiler would be topping up.
"The other thing is we've got a constant hot water system in the kitchen, and I could see that about every hour it just blipped for 5 minutes or so and that was because the water system was always keeping the water boiling rather than letting it cool down." HeatingSave was able to display the energy use, and pinpoint the location of the issue. David was then able to make the necessary changes to how the boilers were operating.
The HeatingSave system in conjunction with the new heating method has been going for 12 months. David then revealed that the combined electric and gas cost for the same period between 2023 and 2024 was £10,489, and 2024 to 2025 was £10,863. However, after the recent changes their energy bill has reduced to just £5324, which is around a 50% reduction!
Thank you very much to David and BoSCC for taking the time to speak with us and for the in-depth information you've shared.