Bourn Golf & Leisure Club saves fuel and money with HeatingSave
The Bourn Golf & Leisure club is located in a beautiful setting in the rural Cambridgeshire, and offers members and visitors alike access to 2 golf courses (18 holes plus pitch and putt), 2 putting greens, a driving range, as well as a top-range health club featuring a swimming pool with sauna and steam room, as well as high-quality bar and restaurant.
Due to its remote setting, with no access to gas pipelines, the club’s central heating system relies on 3 oil-fired boilers that power their extensive radiator system.
Mr. Daniel Barker, the Bourn Golf & Leisure Club General Manager, recalls that the Club started looking for an energy management solution that would enable them to achieve “a superior level of efficiency and better management of our heating system, as well as serious costs savings”.
After being approached by one of the HeatingSave representatives and learning about its comprehensive energy-saving features, the Club’s management ultimately decided to go for a HeatingSave Building Energy Management System.
The HeatingSave controller monitors the temperatures of the boilers’ flow and return, plus the outside temperature and temperature of each heating zone. This enables HeatingSave to gain a complete picture of the leisure club’s heat-loss profile, then automatically “learning” how to optimize energy consumption levels around the building.
The system was installed with no major problems occurred during either the hardware or the software installation processes, both carried out by HeatingSave’s own engineering team.
What’s really interesting to mention about the Building Energy Management Solution installed at the Bourn Golf & Leisure Club is its extensive use of occupancy sensors in order to reduce heating in unoccupied zones (variable occupancy can be a commonplace phenomenon for leisure clubs).
Occupancy sensors allow HeatingSave to automatically turn the heating down to a background temperature when nobody is present but automatically turn it up when employees are present. All of this happens automatically without you having to do anything – whilst HeatingSave keeps staff warm and saves money. Fuel savings for buildings with variable occupancy can be in excess of 20%.
Mr. Barker is quite happy with the PIR’s current level of efficiency (“they’re all up and running OK”). When asked what he likes most about the system, Mr. Barker answered that “it works quite well even when left unattended, and also helps us save money”.
Unfortunately, while acknowledging the fact that the system does save quite a bit on fuel, the Bourn Golf & Leisure General Manager couldn’t provide the HeatingSave reporter with an exact figure in terms of cost savings.
“Prices for fuel have gone up over these long winter months, so I wouldn’t know exactly how much we’ve saved, although we did use less fuel than before,” said Mr. Barker.
In fact, by applying a mathematical heat loss algorithm that constantly learns the heat loss profile of the Bourn Golf & Leisure Club premises, and then fires up the boilers at the very last moment, the club may attain fuel bill savings of up to one-third.
When asked whether he and the staff at the Bourn Golf & Leisure Club consider the HeatingSave system easy to use, Mr.Barker’s answer was “yes, it’s fine”.
Ever since the system was initially installed, the HeatingSave engineers had to be called in on a few occasions in order to fix some functionality issues, but Mr Barker was quite happy with their work: “The engineers were really good, they did a 100% good job”.
When asked by the HeatingSave reporter whether he would recommend the system to other companies or clubs, Mr. Barker’s answer was “Yes, I would recommend the system itself, as it is a good product, as well as the engineers who installed it.”
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Customer Information
Bourn Golf and Leisure Club
Toft Road, Bourn, Cambridge
CB23 2TT
Tel: 0044 (0)1954 718057
