Property

In from the cold

Historic and listed buildings can seem like white elephants, yet in one specific way technology is making it possible to cut costs. Anders Norén reveals how estate managers can reap financial savings through better energy management

Independent schools have a strong tradition of inhabiting some of the UK’s most historic or listed buildings. Architecturally beautiful, such school buildings enrich the learning environment. However, they also come with a unique set of challenges. Since they were designed and built in a very different age, they tend to be hugely energy inefficient, and rack up high fuel costs.

Improving energy efficiency has become a sensible strategy for achieving cost savings. Unfortunately, when it comes to historic buildings, the impulse to protect the delicate fabric can be a barrier to improving energy efficiency in line with modern expectations.

Limited choice?
Within buildings that date back hundreds of years, there is little room for the usual products of energy efficiency. Modern double-glazed windows are typically prohibited by listed building consent. Some insulation work may be carried out, but many historic buildings have interiors that could be detrimentally affected by the addition of internal insulation on the walls.

With conservation rules being so fastidious, it’s not surprising that many managers of historic school buildings resign themselves to being unable to achieving energy efficiency improvements. However, this is no longer the case. While a historic building may never reach the energy-efficiency standards of a new build, there are still significant financial savings to be reaped by plugging expensive energy drains.

Investigations by consultancies TNO, Senternovem and ISSO, reveal that energy consumption in buildings is, on average, 25 per cent higher than it should be, and this is largely because of incorrect climate system settings. In more than 70 per cent of buildings, climate systems do not work at an optimum level, resulting in energy wastage.

Better monitoring of energy across a site can help to identify areas where excessive energy is being used, and it can also unlock other savings, too. Maintenance costs, in particular, can be higher than average within historic schools, due to old-style climate systems that require constant manual input.

Warming to the idea
In the case of Marlborough College, an independent boarding school in Wiltshire that dates back to 1843, an outdated building management system (BMS) made monitoring and managing energy use extremely difficult.

The College is spread across more than 40 separate buildings, all with different uses: classrooms, residential blocks, swimming pool, libraries, equipment houses and stores rooms. Each building had a separate controls system, which meant that adjusting heating levels required an engineer to walk around all the buildings and change the data manually. If there were leaks or anomalies with energy use, isolating the problem was like finding a needle in a haystack, requiring huge amounts of time.

The College elected to replace its old standalone series of building controllers with a high-spec BMS. The change has allowed it to manage the energy use within each building remotely via the internet. Now, site-wide adjustments to heating systems can be made at the click of a mouse, while monitoring and targeting inefficiencies in energy consumption. Important system performance data is now accessed over the school’s local IT network at three PC points, one in the central boiler house and the other two in the estates office.

To protect the historic character of the buildings during installation, much of the existing BMS cabling was reused, leaving the delicate interiors relatively untouched. By not disturbing the fabric of the buildings, the installation was more cost-effective, with minimal disruption to the ongoing activities of the school.

Although Marlborough College might not seem a natural fit for energy efficiency improvements, it has been able to use technology to reduce its maintenance burden, without affecting its beautiful buildings.

Anders Norén is managing director of Priva Building Intelligence.

Return to Property