St Winefrides Rest Home - Littlehampton

St Winefrides wanted heating controls that could control individual radiators in order to make savings. Commercial BEMS systems with this functionality are available from a variety of manufacturers, but these are prohibitively expensive to purchase and install and need trained staff to adjust their settings. Genius Hub offers automatic room-by-room heating control at an affordable price, all controllable through a simple app.

“To be honest it’s too early to say, as this will be the first winter we have had Genius Hub installed. I get the feeling it’s saving us quite a bit though because I often walk into an empty room and it has really cooled down. Previously we would have been heating that room all day, even though it’s empty.

We’ve also finally been able to get rid of all those oil filled electric radiators! It’s also really useful how it automatically shuts off the radiator when the window is open, so we aren’t wasting all that heat when somebody forgets to shut the window, which used to happen.”

“I definitely had my concerns before we had it installed; it’s really essential for us to keep our clients warm so we really can’t afford to have any difficulties with our heating system. We also couldn’t have anything that would be difficult for our clients to use. This is definitely a “high tech” solution so I needed a lot of reassurance that it would work without a glitch.”

“I’m pleased to say that those fears turned out to be unfounded; it’s been really reliable and surprisingly easy to use. We did have an issue with one of the valves not connecting properly at first, but the technical support from Genius was great. They’ve always responded to us within a day or just a few hours, even when we just wanted some advice on how to set it up in the best way for us. It’s really reassuring to know that if we ever had any difficulties with the system, their support team would be there to help us out.”

“Yes, the heating is now a lot more balanced: all the rooms are kept at a comfortable temperature when they’re in use. That wasn’t the case before, because the boilers we have aren’t really big enough to heat the whole space. Also, the largest bedroom was always cold, because there weren’t enough radiators to keep that big room warm. Now it’s noticeably more comfortable throughout the home – not stiflingly hot, but a comfortably warm temperature everywhere. 

That’s because the boilers don’t have to work nearly as hard now because they’re only heating the rooms that are in use. They can get the radiators up to a higher temperature, so even the largest bedroom is nice and warm now. I could have solved this by buying a big new gas boiler, but that wouldn’t have been cheap and we would have ended up with larger gas bills, not smaller. That doesn’t seem like a smart solution to me!”