How to manage heat consumption in an organisation with Nexo?
Energy costs are rising. Rational management of its resources is becoming a challenge for individual users and office or institution administrators responsible for all the premises subordinate to them. Very often, these are spread over different floors and, in the case of complex structures, in other buildings.
Adjusting thermostats – an unwanted employee ‘chore.’
Let’s focus on one energy resource – heat energy. Offices and educational institutions work at strictly defined hours on specific days of the week. To save on heating, employees might be asked to reduce the room temperature at the end of the day (or at weekends or holidays), e.g., to 6℃. Upon arriving at the office in the morning, employees must regulate the thermostats and restore the previous settings.
However, such a scenario is fraught with considerable risk of failure. Firstly, employees need to remember what they were asked to do. Secondly, knowing they will be freezing the next day at work before the room has warmed up, they may deliberately fail to turn down the radiators. Of course, the administrator can take it upon themselves to check each room at the end of the working day and manually adjust the thermostats. Such a solution will work for a small number of rooms, but it is inefficient and highly disruptive even then.
Heating under administrator control
The Nexo app comes to the rescue. In the previous article “Save energy with the Nexo app”, I described how to use it to manage the temperature in a flat, but the full potential of this solution can be seen only when we talk about an entire building or complex of buildings. With Nexo, the administrator fully controls the intelligent (smart) devices installed in the rooms. Nexo allows the creation of temperature schedules for a single room or a group of rooms. Knowing the work schedule in a particular office, the administrator can define a schedule of temperature changes for each room – thus preventing heat loss when rooms are not in use while ensuring comfort during working hours.
A place where Nexo can find use is in universities. It is very often the case that a particular lecture theatre is only occupied for a few hours a week, but it is usually heated continuously. If the administrator has Nexo at his disposal, all he needs to know is the classroom’s timetable – on this basis, he can easily define an effective heating schedule.
The problem of heated “empty” rooms also applies to schools and offices. We can reduce energy consumption in each of these places by properly managing the temperature – which will quickly translate into financial savings.
All data in one place
Nexo gives the administrator an overview of the detailed data provided by the thermostatic heads and installed sensors. The data is presented in user-friendly graphs using state-of-the-art solutions, which I will write about in future articles. It is possible to see what temperature was in the room during the day, for how long, and at what times the thermostat head was fully open – and at the same time, a window was also open. We find this out by mounting the appropriate sensors on the windows – Nexo will ‘take care’ of the rest.
The data provided by the application enables a detailed analysis of a selected time interval: day, week, or month, as required. Collecting data manually or entering it into various systems is unnecessary. With Nexo, they are collected, stored, and presented in one place. The attached graphic shows what the temperature schedule described above for different rooms can look like.
Nexo is the perfect solution for central heat management for institutions. We have implemented our application in, among others, kindergartens in Krakow, where it is already producing results in the form of real savings.