Church of Scotland Uses BEMS for Time & Attendance Purposes

St Ninian’s Church of Scotland, situated in the West of Edinburgh, installed a HeatingSave building energy management system in 2010 to address high heating bills and room booking issues.

The main reason they reached out to HeatingSave was to save money on their heating and energy bills while tackling an ongoing room temperature issue within their premises. The church consists of 10 halls and can host around 600 people at one time. Groups and clubs within the local community, such as day nurseries and dance groups, are among a long list of people who use the church’s facilities. 

Mr. Kirkpatrick, the church holder, said that “the problem was one group would reset the thermostat to suit themselves and not set it back. We recognised we needed to take this out of the control of the users and control it centrally.”

With the huge number of different people and groups using the facilities within the church every day, Mr. Kirkpatrick required a system that enabled him to track who was in the church and at what time, giving him the ability to adjust the room temperature from his computer according to who was using the room: “We control it remotely, we get the hall bookings a month at a time and pre-set everything.”

Building energy management system for time and attendance 

A building energy management system (BEMS) has many benefits for any type of building. These benefits include saving around 20-to-30% (and sometimes higher) on your heating and energy bills, as well as featuring an advanced room booking system, enabling you to keep on top of who uses your facilities and when they use them. 

HeatingSave’s BEMS includes an all-encompassing room booking system that gives you a complete overview of who is using a certain room and at what time, allowing you to know when to set the heating to turn on and at which temperature depending on the activity taking place. For example, if a day nursery is hiring a room, the temperature may want to be warmer to keep the children warm, whereas a gym or dance class may require the room to be slightly cooler. 

HeatingSave’s room booking system provides you with the necessary data to control all aspects of the building’s energy usage as well as room occupancy and bookings. The room booking system serves as an excellent time and attendance system which allows halls, churches and other similar buildings to rent out various areas of the building and control booking logistics and payments. It also offers easy-to-use software, including a wall planner for simple visualisation of current and future bookings.

That’s your time and attendance needs resolved in one, all-encompassing system.

BEMS links to smart card access control

Building energy management systems allow you to control every aspect of your building from the comfort of your own home. Our smart card readers and smart cards are the missing pieces to the puzzle. They can be linked to HeatingSave’s room booking software for time and attendance as well as access control purposes. By using smart card readers for access control, you are able to grant or deny access to specific people into certain areas of the building without you having to be present at the building to do this yourself. Access control smart cards can be made permanent for staff or cleaners or, alternatively, they can be made for temporary use for users of the facility and access can be granted for the duration of their booking.

If you would like more information on HeatingSave’s building energy management system, our time and attendance or access control systems, then please do not hesitate to get in touch with a member of our sales team who is on hand to help.