Author: April (Genius Hub)

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Custom House Hotel

CustomHouse
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Custom House Hotel

CUSTOM HOUSE HOTEL

CASE STUDY

SCOTLAND

Custom House Hotel is in a great location overlooking the River Clyde in West Scotland. Suffering from many years of neglect, the hotel was formally known as The Bay Hotel and was purchased by the current co-owner John 18 months ago. After a successful regeneration project, costing in excess of £300,000, the new management team have brought it back to its former glory. The newly named Custom House Hotel has been renovated beyond recognition and now offers a great place to eat or sleep in Greenock.

Why smart heating controls?
Adding a state of the art system is a necessity to achieve energy efficiencies, improve the running costs and to achieve that ‘personal touch’ experience for the visitors and guests at the hotel.

 Why Genius Hub?

The Custom House Hotel wanted heating controls that could cut heating costs while keeping their clients warm – and didn’t want staff to constantly adjust it. Any system would need to control individual radiators in order to make any savings. 

Commercial BEM systems’ or ‘Commercial BEMS (Building Energy Management Systems) with this functionality are available from a variety of manufacturers, but these are prohibitively expensive to purchase and install, and need trained staff to adjust their settings.

Genius Hub offers automatic room-by-room heating control at an affordable price, all-controllable through a simple app.

What were their first impressions of Genius Hub?
Installation of the Genius Hub is quick, easy and causes no disruption, because it creates it’s own wireless network. Fixed wireless repeaters ensure the connection is rock-solid.

Trained installers fit the system in one or two days. The hotel’s site manager John tells us: “We love to explain the system to our customers and how they can get just the right temperature in their room as well as knowing that we’re doing all that we can to reduce our carbon footprint.”

Can Genius Hub cut their bills?
Genius Hub can offer at least 30% energy savings, but it all depends how it’s used – savings are higher when rooms are left empty for several hours. So if the hotel is quieter, your energy bills will also be reduced.

Previously, rooms would have been heated all day, even though they were empty. The system also identifies and automatically shuts off the radiator when the window is open, thus not wasting heat.

Has the hotel benefitted in any other way?
John tells us: “This could have be done on its own however we did it as part of spending extensive amounts of money on improving the hotel.” He explains “things like double glazing and a new roof show investment into the property just like adding the state of the art technology that the Genius Hub system incorporates”

“In 5 years time the owners may want to sell the hotel and adding value is important which I feel we’ve done with the latest technology that Genius Hub have installed”. He stated that by “investing in Genius Hub that they have future proofed the Hotel”.

Have there been any problems with the Genius Hub?

Every business needs to keep a tight control of the financials and John tells us that it’s not easy to get three investors to make a decision on investment but “Genius Hub made it pretty easy.”

John tells us that: “we thought that we’d have to borrow the money” but discovered other options were available with the excellent variation of payment platforms offered by Genius Hub.

They all agreed that the Genius Hub was something that they would recommend.

Customer House Hotel Outside

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Situated at the heart of Greenock’s history, we are located directly across from the 200 year old Custom House.
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St Winefrides Rest Home

St Winifrieds Care Home
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St Winifrieds Care Home

ST WINEFRIDES REST HOME

CASE STUDY

LITTLEHAMPTON

Raj Seedeehul, to find out how they’re using Genius Hub to cut their heating costs and provide a higher standard of care for their clients.

Why smart heating controls?
Care homes offer a particular challenge when trying to control heating effectively. Elderly and vulnerable clients need to be kept warm at all times. Although each client has their own temperature preferences, they frequently forget to adjust manual controls, instead, staff have to take responsibility for ensuring appropriate temperatures – a needless distraction from providing the highest standard of care for their clients. 

Standard heating timers also wouldn’t work effectively either, even if they operated on a room-by-room basis. Patterns of how each client moves around the home are different for each individual and aren’t entirely predictable. 

That’s why most care homes have a simple solution: leave the heating on in all the rooms, all the time. Unfortunately, that leads to enormous heating bills. Before installing Genius Hub, St Winefrides was spending over £4000 a year on heating.

 Why Genius Hub?
St Winefrides wanted heating controls that could control individual radiators in order to make savings. Commercial BEMS systems with this functionality are available from a variety of manufacturers, but these are prohibitively expensive to purchase and install and need trained staff to adjust their settings. Genius Hub offers automatic room-by-room heating control at an affordable price, all controllable through a simple app.

 What were their first impressions of Genius Hub?
Installation of the Genius Hub is quick, easy and causes no disruption because it creates its own wireless network

Fixed wireless repeaters ensure the connection is rock-solid. Genius’ own trained installers fit the system in one or two days. But once it was installed, what was their first impression of using the system? “The system has been really easy to use”, says Raj. 

“We can actually just forget it’s even there, because all the rooms are in the automatic ‘Footprint’ mode – we found that’s the best because each of the clients have a different schedule and sometimes they forget to do things, so it’s great that it will just keep the heating warm for as long as they stay in the room.”

 “In reality, though, I love to micro-manage the heating! It’s nice that I can see the temperature of every room on my phone – the temperature readings from the room sensors seem to be really accurate. It means I don’t have to walk around the whole home checking; I can just see at a glance that there are no problems, and if a client wants me to adjust the temperature in their bedroom, I can do it right there in front of them – even if we’re in the lounge at the time. They like that.”

“Also, some clients prefer their bedrooms warmer at night and some prefer it cooler, the system is so person-centred that each client can have their heating micromanaged to their exact needs. 

In the eyes of the CQC the Care home is ‘Effective’ and ‘Responsive’ to client’s needs; it just turns the temperature down automatically every night at a set time. It’s one less thing for staff to remember, and helps us make our clients more comfortable, which is really a priority for us.”

Can Genius Hub cut their bills?
“To be honest it’s too early to say, as this will be the first winter we have had Genius Hub installed. I get the feeling it’s saving us quite a bit though because I often walk into an empty room and it has really cooled down. Previously we would have been heating that room all day, even though it’s empty.

We’ve also finally been able to get rid of all those oil filled electric radiators! It’s also really useful how it automatically shuts off the radiator when the window is open, so we aren’t wasting all that heat when somebody forgets to shut the window, which used to happen.”

Can Genius Hub cut their bills?
“I definitely had my concerns before we had it installed; it’s really essential for us to keep our clients warm so we really can’t afford to have any difficulties with our heating system. We also couldn’t have anything that would be difficult for our clients to use. This is definitely a “high tech” solution so I needed a lot of reassurance that it would work without a glitch.”

“I’m pleased to say that those fears turned out to be unfounded; it’s been really reliable and surprisingly easy to use. We did have an issue with one of the valves not connecting properly at first, but the technical support from Genius was great. They’ve always responded to us within a day or just a few hours, even when we just wanted some advice on how to set it up in the best way for us. It’s really reassuring to know that if we ever had any difficulties with the system, their support team would be there to help us out.”

Has the hotel benefitted in any other way?
“Yes, the heating is now a lot more balanced: all the rooms are kept at a comfortable temperature when they’re in use. That wasn’t the case before, because the boilers we have aren’t really big enough to heat the whole space. Also, the largest bedroom was always cold, because there weren’t enough radiators to keep that big room warm. Now it’s noticeably more comfortable throughout the home – not stiflingly hot, but a comfortably warm temperature everywhere. 

That’s because the boilers don’t have to work nearly as hard now because they’re only heating the rooms that are in use. They can get the radiators up to a higher temperature, so even the largest bedroom is nice and warm now. I could have solved this by buying a big new gas boiler, but that wouldn’t have been cheap and we would have ended up with larger gas bills, not smaller. That doesn’t seem like a smart solution to me!”

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Mr. Roe

Hay Family Home
Hay Family Home

MR. ROE

CASE STUDY

DURHAM

Mr Roe, his wife and parents live in a lovely rural home near Durham, in Northeast England. It was built in the 1750s. Fireplaces originally provided heat throughout the house, as you can see from the 12 chimneys along the roofline. Fires were lit in the rooms as necessary. Now, the house is heated by an LPG-fired boiler, but heating the entire 6000 sq. ft property is very expensive. Roe was looking for a way to heat their home that had the individual room control of the original fireplaces, with the convenience of central heating. The Genius Hub provided the ideal solution.

Why switch to smart heating?
“For me, the decision to get smart heating was primarily an economic one. Smart heating provides an intelligent way of controlling the house, without overheating or under heating individual rooms. With smart heating, you only heat rooms when you use them. I admit there was also the ‘cool factor’ of being able to use my phone to control each room from anywhere. I was definitely attracted to the ‘zoned’ systems that control each radiator. It’s much more convenient than having to go throughout the house to turn radiators off when the rooms are not being used. You really need do that in a home this size; otherwise would cost a fortune to heat!”

Why did you choose the Genius Hub?
“I looked at some comparison reviews of smart systems, including Honeywell, Nest and Tado. In those reviews, people glowed about The Genius Hub. They were incredibly effusive and said that The Genius Hub was the most capable system on the market. No other system on the market had as many features, or was as flexible, as The Genius Hub. The other systems limited the number of zones we could control and lacked the automatic footprint mode. Also, the other products were “clunky” with bulky valves or controllers that wouldn’t fit into our home. For larger houses, there is simply no other system that can do as much as The Genius Hub.”

Were there any concerns?
“Yes, I was worried that as The Genius Hub is a wireless system, it wouldn’t work well in our house. We can’t get our cordless phone to work across the house even with two range extenders, so we were worried about the range of the signal. I spoke to the Genius home technical team and they assured me that it would be fine, as each radiator valve and smart plug repeats the signal, and they’d installed it in large homes before without any problem. We went ahead with it, and it does indeed work perfectly well; there’s a strong signal everywhere.”.

What were your first impressions of the Genius Hub?
“Before ordering, I rang up with a number of questions about the installation. The guys on the phone were incredibly helpful and talked me through the configuration of the system. In one room we have 6 radiators, but the team sorted it all out, so I knew exactly what to order. We bought it through the website and then liaised with the local installer. When the kit arrived, it was already labelled and configured, so the components just needed to be installed. It was very easy; I didn’t need to do anything. The installer did experiment a bit with positioning the smart plugs, to find the locations that gave the strongest network signal. But apart from that, it was completely straightforward. I loved that I could let the Genius home technicians log into my system, so they could give us remote support if we needed it. More importantly, though, it just worked!”

Has Genius Hub lived up to your expectations?
“Yes, absolutely. It’s given us the control we need so that we can easily stay comfortable without wasting money. I also particularly like how it looks in our home. The Genius Hub is clean, white and smart, which fits in very well in all of the rooms, even the more formal rooms. For example, there is not much to see on the radiator valves, they are very discreet. The room sensors are much smaller than we expected – we thought that they would be the same size as security sensors but actually they are tiny, so no one notices them. The other systems look utterly dated and very poor in comparison. Another thing that’s great about The Genius Hub is the ability to chop and change; moving radiator valves from one zone to another was easy to do. We did that because we realised that we didn’t need control of one room that we had bought a valve and room sensor for. We easily moved the valve and room sensor to another room and then assigned it to a new room on the app.”

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David Hay

Hay Family
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Hay Family

DAVID HAY

CASE STUDY

YORKSHIRE

David, Lizzie and their children, Sephy and Zephyrus, live in a stunning period building that previously served as a pump house. It is located in a beautiful rural area of North Yorkshire, surrounded by fields and hedgerows. It’s a spacious property and, like so many older homes, cost a fortune to heat. The heating used to run on LPG, and would land them with a heating bill of £2,800 per year.

Why did David choose Genius Hub?
With their heating bill through the roof, David was on the hunt for solutions. Many of the options or improving the building itself, such as wall insulation, would be very expensive and disruptive. David saw that smarter heating controls were clearly the place to start, especially as they have many rooms they don’t often use: 

“The fact that The Genius Hub is fully wireless means it was really easy to install. You don’t need fancy wiring, or the walls knocked about. All you need is the Genius Hub and the valves on the radiators, and you get this new level of flexibility which no other system can offer.I had considered Nest and Honeywell evohome, they both popped up when I searched, but they would not work as well for us. The Nest just controls one zone, so it would cost a fortune to have multiple ones in the house, and evohome doesn’t offer the automatic control. Price wasn’t the most important factor, but The Genius Hub system actually worked out cheaper than evohome anyway. This system is the only one that offers all of the options for complete control, and it is so clearly the best on the market.”

What was the main concern?
With a large property and the desire to control all 28 radiators individually, the initial outlay on the Genius home equipment wasn’t insignificant. Did David have any questions or concerns before making the investment?

“Not really. I guess the only concern was the battery life for the valves.  That’s turned out to not be an issue at all, actually. I get about a year out of the normal batteries that came with the system, but I bought a load of AA Energiser lithium batteries from eBay for £1 each and they last even longer. So far they have been in for 6 months and are still reading 100%!”

“The only question I had before ordering was about the fitting of the valves because the towel radiators were slightly different to the others, but Genius home technical support was great at helping me with that. I also didn’t realise that I didn’t need a dump radiator, but that was explained to me too by one of the technical team. After that I just ordered it online, it was easy.”

 

How does David use the Genius Hub system?
The Genius Hub is the only zoned home heating control that can be a truly “fit and forget” solution, as it learns when you use each room and automatically cuts energy consumption without impacting on your comfort. David sometimes prefers to exercise a bit more control over his heating though.

“In the winter we tend to keep all of the rooms cooler and then simply go to the app and boost the rooms when we plan to use them. I always use The Genius Hub app on my Android phone and that works really well. I’ve recently started using my Windows tablet and that works quite nicely too.” 

“I also keep it on a tab on my browser, so when I am working in the study, I can just boost it as required. We’ve also got room sensors in some of the rooms. The kitchen is in ‘Footprint mode’, so it learns when the room is used and warms it up before we use it, and that works well. Otherwise, the other rooms are in the super-eco mode, which means the rooms only heat up when there is someone actually using them. This works well with the rooms that we use less frequently. Now that it is all set up it is spot on, we almost ignore that it is even here. I love  just heating the rooms when I am using them, it just makes so much sense!”

Is the Genius Hub energy saving?
It’s fun to be able to control your heating down to the individual room, but the bottom line is: how much energy does it actually save?

“After installing The Genius Hub, the cost of heating the house dropped by 40% in the first winter. So it was instantly saving us over £1,000 per year off our gas bill giving us a 2-year payback! Since then, we’ve had a Ground Source Heat Pump installed, to replace the LPG boiler.” 

“The company that installed the heat pump estimated that our heating bill would go down to £1,000 per year, but because we’ve got The Genius Hub, it’s actually gone down to just £400. So with just those two technologies combined, we’ve seen a seven-fold decrease in the cost of our heating.”

What is it like to use the Genius Hub?
Nothing beats an old-fashioned thermostat for simplicity, even if it’s a wasteful option. Is it complicated to control such a large zoned system using The Genius Hub?

“It’s really easy to control everything via The Genius Hub app, it’s just a couple of taps to heat whichever room you need next. I can’t say how enthusiastic I am about the system; it provides us with everything that we ever needed in terms of heating control. Also, the response from Genius Hub was amazing if there was a concern about any part of how the system worked. I cannot fault the after-sales service, any problem has been resolved and even at really unsociable hours sometimes. I am quite evangelical about it really, I like the concept and I like the fact that it saves us money. I think that this is how all homes should be controlled. I really think that this is the best thing that we have done to our home. I really love it!”

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