Sienna Monastery

The Monastery was built to take advantage of solar gain with most of the work/community rooms on the South side with large windows. We wanted Smart Heating Controls so that when those rooms were at temperature that entire zone would turn off to avoid wasting energy. However, we also needed to be able to have individual rooms trigger the boiler because when the South of the building was very warm, the rooms at the North or West could be much colder, and we needed to be sure of heat for our elderly sisters. 

We wanted a system where the individual rooms triggered the boiler, because of the wide range of temperature differences between different rooms in the building. Of the wireless systems that offered that level of control Genius Hub was the only one capable of covering all the rooms in our building, which is very big. The high level of control and ease of use was also a factor. The very professional and informative response to our query and the quality of planning of the installation layout and integration with our existing system also contributed.

Firstly, it does what we wanted it to and once the different rooms have been programmed with heating temperatures and times it just works away with no extra involvement from us. There is a great deal of ability to control when and why the heat comes on and to control the effect of manually changing the temperature settings – e.g. we use the motion sensors to control heat in some rooms and many rooms are set to only have the manual override last for 1 or 2 hours, so that if someone comes into a room for a short period and turns on the heat the room will not continue to heat all day. 

Our annual gas usage dropped by 13-15% (compared to usage over the previous 4 years). The savings would, however, have been much larger were it not for heat-loss issues our building has. The savings in Nov/Dec/Jan/Feb are quite low because the system has to run at full capacity to try and maintain the heat in the building i.e. it rarely reaches the point when the rooms turn off. The savings in the milder months were much higher, with a drop in gas usage of 30% in April & 50% in May. 

Conversation with Sr Teresa July 2023:

Total KWh saved

350’000 pre Genius 

300’000 after Genius 

250’000 after changing to smaller boilers - The genius system enabled us to install smaller boilers because there was less heating demand.

The system is very easy to use and even those who are not ‘tech-savy’ can manage the controls. There was a bit of experimentation initially to find the heating set-up that worked best for the different rooms (what set-back temperature to have rooms at when not in use etc) but once that is discovered it works great with very little user involvement.

We found Gaia Smart Energy excellent. The work was completed quickly and to a high standard. Joe was friendly, easy to work with and highly professional. They were very good at accommodating our particular needs  (e.g. not drilling during our Mass or Prayer times, and instead scheduling ‘quieter work’ during those times).  The system itself works very well and we would certainly recommend both the system and the company to others.