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  CASE STUDY: Best Western Buckingham Hotel

  • Heating: Electric Panel Heaters 
  • Control: Individual temperature & time programming for each room – from reception.
  • Hot Water: Gas Heated, controlled by reception.
  • Interface with hotel management program

Located on the outskirts of Buckingham, the unique architecture of this hotel combines sophisticated facilities with an informal atmosphere.

The hotel boasts 70 en-suite bedrooms, 5 conference suites, 7 purpose built syndicate rooms, restaurant with carvery, table d’hote and à la carte menu, bar, lounge and leisure club with swimming pool, Hot Tub and gym.

Jitesh Patel, owner of the hotel, explains the issue he had: “All our heaters are electric, and we found they were left on, blazing away, heating the room whether they were occupied or empty and that was costing us money, so we wanted some kind of timing and control mechanism in place to avoid this and save costs.”

Prefect Controls’ experience of the hospitality and student residential markets gives a useful insight into the high expectations of heating and hot water systems on the part of users, as well as a clear understanding of the need to manage operating costs. Jitesh continues “The primary consideration was to save energy, money and control our costs more. I couldn’t find anyone else that had a system like Prefect. Air conditioning would have been so much more expensive. We would never have recovered the investment.”

The Prefect Irus central control system was specified to satisfy demanding control requirements while avoiding uneconomic cost. Prefect Irus is specifically designed to interface with hotel management software, which makes the system easy to use while providing control over temperatures and time profiles all year round. The link into the front-of-house ‘booking program’ enables the system to anticipate arrivals and raise temperatures to comfort levels in occupied rooms, and lower them to “set-back” when vacant. The connection, in this case with the hotel software provider took only a short time to establish, with no disruption to the smooth working of the hotel.

Command signals are transmitted along existing electrical mains network (by Mains Borne Signalling). So, as installation involves no pilot wiring, final commissioning was completed in just one day. Jitesh comments, “Installation was very easy and quick, they came in, sorted everything out and the job was done. We set it up and it works, and to be honest it is a ‘set it and forget it’ system, I think the timings and temperatures I set at the beginning are the same now and it’s all running fine, I’ve not touched it since”.

Irus is easy to install and operate, popular with guests and staff alike, making it simple for the hotel to save energy. Jitesh concludes, “Guests seem happy, we make sure their rooms are warm, which is what they want and they can turn it up and down as they wish. I think we recovered the cost of the whole system within about two years.”