Lindum Group achieves impressive energy savings with HeatingSave

The Lindum Group was founded back in 1956 as a very small, civil engineering-focused company. Over the years, the business expanded to building and large construction projects, especially in the food manufacturing and retailing sectors, as well as education and social housing. Today, Lindum directly employs around 450 people at any one time and has a turnover of £80m, with offices in Lincoln, Grimsby, Spalding, Peterborough and London.

Lindum has 12 trading divisions, actively involved in construction, joint venture commercial property, housebuilding, plant, joinery and maintenance within East Anglia and the East Midlands.

Around a year ago, the company started considering the implementation of an energy-saving system at their headquarters in Lincoln, that houses around 150 members of staff. Lindum’s Facilities Manager, Mr. Warren Glover, recalls that the company’s main target, at the time, was to “enable cost savings” and “streamline the functionality of the ambient heating system”.

The company’s premises, Lindum Business Park, relies on a central heating system powered by three high-capacity gas-fired boilers and featuring a large number of radiators. Given the fact that they were looking for a superior level of control over the heating system, Lindum decided to install no less than three different HeatingSave Small Business systems, each managing a separate boiler and specific area of the building complex.

The HeatingSave Small Business system enables users to save energy by setting up specific heating pattern control so the heating is not on during weekends or holidays unless the building is being used. The intelligent controller at the heart of the system “self learns” the heat-loss profile of any building so that it can switch on the heating later if its warm and also switch off earlier if its cold.

Other important features worth mentioning include gradient control of room temperatures at different times of the day, hot water priority varying boiler temperatures automatically, as well as automatic summer hot water decision between electricity and gas, whichever is the cheapest.

The system was put in place by HeatingSave engineers and Mr. Glover recalls that no major issues were encountered during either the hardware or software installation processes.

Since, as Premises Manager, Mr. Warren Glover is also in charge of controlling the HeatingSave system, he received in-depth training regarding the use of its various features and functions. He describes the quality of the training process as “OK”. “It was informative enough”, Mr. Glover added.

When asked whether the HeatingSave systems are used at their full potential, Mr. Glover provided an affirmative answer. More importantly, as Mr. Glover revealed, the systems have helped Lindum save quite a serious amount of money on their fuel bills: “Although I can’t really provide a perfectly accurate figure, I’d say that the HeatingSave systems help us save around 5,000 pounds on our annual fuel bills”.

Apart from the actual savings they enable, Mr. Glover’s favourite part of the HeatingSave systems is their “simplicity”. “I was also quite impressed by the graph display”, Mr. Glover added.

The systems installed at the Lindum Group premises are connected to a PC running the HeatingSave software, that enables a superior level of control over the central heating system’s functionality. Furthermore, since it’s running of a PC, the HeatingSave system also allows Lindum’s premises manager to use the diary function for changing heating patterns – “a very good feature”, according to Mr. Glover.

Ever since the systems were installed, Mr. Glover only had to call up the HeatingSave help desk a couple of times in order to solve some minor issues, and he describes the quality of the service the operators provided as “it was all right, good. They were all very informative”. And, in fact, the information the help desk provided was quite sufficient, as the HeatingSave Operations Department never had to visit the Lindum site in order to repair the system.

Since HeatingSave has worked so well for Lindum Construction, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the company’s actually seriously considering extending the system in the future.

“When the HeatingSave systems were initially installed, we were hoping to be able to control them via one of our Citrix servers. We’re still working with HeatingSave towards achieving that goal. Plus, we’re also actively considering extending the system to other parts of our business park, and perhaps other sites as well”, Mr. Glover told the HeatingSave reporter.

When asked whether he would recommend the HeatingSave Building Energy Management System to other companies, Mr. Glover’s answer was a definite “Yes”. Summing up his views of HeatingSave, Mr. Warren Glover, the Lindum Group Premises Manager, said that “It is a very good system and I love the simplicity of it. In fact, it makes money saving easy. Bottom line, it’s everything we thought it would be”.

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Customer Information

Lindum Group Ltd

Station Road

North Hykeham

Lincoln

LN6 3QX

Telephone: 01522 500300

Fax: 01522 500377

Web: http://www.lindumgroup.com/

Email: webmail@lindumgroup.co.uk