Category: Energy Efficiency

In Ankara a combi boiler runs on average six to seven months a year. Over a season that long, what decides the bill is usually not the brand of the boiler but how many hours a day it burns for nothing. A boiler trying to hold 22 degrees while nobody is home is not heating anybody; it is burning money. Preventing exactly that is a smart thermostat’s job.

Where exactly does the saving come from?

There is no magic, only arithmetic. In heating, every 1 degree of setback cuts fuel consumption by roughly 6%. A smart thermostat makes that reduction at the right moments, without giving up comfort:

• Programme: if the home is empty between 08:00 and 18:00 on weekdays, the temperature is pulled back to 17-18 degrees and returns to the old comfort level before you walk through the door.
• Location (geofencing): when your phone moves away from the house the system turns itself down; even when plans change, “I forgot to turn the thermostat off” stops being a problem.
• Remote control: you go on holiday and the snow comes down; you switch on frost protection from the app and start heating the house a day before you return.
• Data: you see how long it ran on which day, and the bill stops being a surprise.

When these four habits come together, drops in the heating and cooling bill expressed in double-digit percentages are realistic in the field. How large the drop is depends on the insulation of the home and on your existing habits — for a meticulous user who is home all day and manages the temperature by hand, the gain stays limited; in a house run on “turn it up in the morning, turn it down at night, sometimes forget”, the difference is serious.

At home: giving the boiler a brain

A classic room thermostat knows one thing: “what is the temperature right now?” The Cosa wireless thermostat also knows the time, your location and your programme. It connects to your existing boiler without renovation, and if you do not like where it sits you can move it, because it is wireless. In summer you can run your air conditioner from the same app — one app, two seasons.

At work: when the working day ends, the system’s day should end too

In offices and shops the most common waste is the system carrying on after everyone has left in the evening. A programmable thermostat solves that at the root: it drops into eco mode at the end of the working day and applies a different scenario at weekends. If there are several branches or floors, networked models let you monitor them all from one panel. We described what this approach looks like at mall and hotel scale in our article on corporate energy management; for the project side, see our Corporate Energy Efficiency page.

Why do installation and the first settings matter?

A smart thermostat stays “smart” only if it is installed properly: where the device sits in the room (never above a radiator, never on a sunlit wall), the connection to the boiler on the right protocol, and the first programme scenario set up together with the user. We do the installation and build that first scenario with you; the user learns the app in ten minutes.

Projenza Engineering and Energy Solutions — an Ankara-based mechanical installation and energy company. About Us • Services • Projects • References

Put a shopping centre’s monthly electricity bills side by side and the picture is almost always the same: the largest item is air conditioning, the second is lighting. The good news is that these are also the items that shrink most easily — because most of the waste does not come from a technical shortcoming but from things running that nobody sees: an air handling unit cooling an empty cinema, plant that keeps running after the working day ends, hotel rooms heated although they were never sold.

Measure first: you cannot manage consumption you cannot see

The first step in energy management is not investment, it is measurement. Meters on the main supply and the critical circuits produce an hourly map of consumption. That map usually delivers a few surprises in the first week: a ventilation unit running at three in the morning, a chiller at full capacity over the weekend. An energy management system makes that visibility permanent; when something is abnormal you get an alert instead of waiting for a report.

Second step: an empty space should be a turned-down space

In high-consumption buildings the largest source of saving is occupancy-based control. In a hotel an unsold room drops into eco mode automatically; with a key card system the air conditioning turns down when the guest leaves the room. In an office a working-hours scenario runs, in a shop an opening and closing scenario. On the hardware side this means networked thermostats and zone-based automation — our retail energy automation solution was built for exactly this job. In a chain, managing every branch from one screen means no longer being at the mercy of whatever the branch staff set the air conditioning to.

Third step: fix the physics of the system

Automation cannot rescue an unbalanced installation. In a building where some floors are baking while others are cold, hydronic balance has to come first; balancing valves give each circuit its design flow and lower pump energy at the same time. In the same way, a neglected unit is a loss of efficiency: an air conditioner running on a dirty filter and short of refrigerant does the same work with 10-30% more electricity. In corporate facilities we tie this into a calendar with a periodic maintenance agreement.

How does the investment pay back?

Before starting a project we produce a return-on-investment analysis from your consumption data: what each step gains, in what order it should be done, and in how many months the investment returns. In most facilities the fastest return comes from measurement plus occupancy scenarios; balancing and maintenance make the gain permanent over the medium term. We have set out the whole process step by step on our Corporate Energy Efficiency page.

A short checklist

• Can you see your hourly consumption data?
• Are empty spaces (rooms, halls, floors) turned down automatically?
• Are your out-of-hours scenarios defined?
• Is the installation hydronically balanced?
• Is the maintenance calendar for the air conditioning and plant actually running?

If you answer “no” to two of these five, a measurable saving potential is waiting for you.

Projenza Engineering and Energy Solutions — an Ankara-based mechanical installation and energy company. About Us • Services • Projects • References