CASE STUDY ENGLISH HERITAGE
It’s vital that we monitor the condition of our historic places and
the environment the collection lives in.”
26 MAY 2021
understand energy usage.
Says Hartley: “Energy management is
an issue with heritage buildings. You can’t
double glaze them or stick solar panels
everywhere so they represent a di erent
challenge to other buildings. If you can’t turn
it into an eco-building you have to find ways
to minimise the outgoings through that data
insight.”
Adds Chadwick: “English Heritage already
had smart meters, but that wasn’t giving
them enough real time understanding of
building energy use. Now, working with the
properties director we can o er a solution
where he doesn’t have to visit each site but
can access the data on a Shepherd module
which we call ‘energy analytics’ and see why
certain buildings cost more than the rest of
the portfolio.
“We’ll also be able to benchmark each
property against each other to understand
why one performs better than the other.
What are they doing di erently and what
are the shared learnings? Through this
intelligence property data can be shared
across the portfolio and used to help all of
English Heritage properties improve their
utilisation.”
Concludes Duncan-Finn: “The analytical
insight is assisting us in our objective to
reduce our operating costs by a quarter, and
all the money we’re saving is being used
for conservation and operational budgets.
The data insight we had has enabled us to
develop a more focused/informed planned
preventive maintenance regime alongside
a targeted investment programme in
the replacement of ageing mechanical
infrastructure, as we now have a greater
insight about the opportune time to invest in
replacement plants.
“It will also help us with procuring
specialists with targeted experience relevant
to the energy saving objective we’re hoping
to achieve.”
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the optimal time to replace equipment which
derogates over its’ lifecycle.
“From an energy perspective it’s been
quite interesting as the largest draw of
energy in Kenwood House was the kitchen.
The facility had a lot of equipment which
was running 24/7 so we were able to advise
the building manager what should be shut
down regularly. Then the pandemic hit and
it was a case of making sure every asset was
monitored during the lockdown, which also
meant lessening the risk of fire or damage.”
“During the pandemic the on-call engineer
and security guard could be kept informed
when things needed to be done and where
plant had been le running, so Shepherd
became the 24/7 eyes and ears onsite.
Someone would always know the status of
the entire property.”
SUCCESS OF PILOT
Although the pilot was launched prior to
the pandemic, the technology was already
in place to monitor Kenwood House
throughout lockdown, which included
charting the e ects of not having any visitors
on the property.
Explains Duncan-Finn: “It’s vital that we
monitor the condition of our historic places
and the environment the collection lives in –
during lockdown it meant we could go down
to a skeleton sta while the house has been
closed, as with the IoT remote sensors inside
the house we could still continue real-time
monitoring, as if there was a full team of sta
in the house.”
Adds Hartley: “We know from other places
that a lack of people can have a detrimental
e ect on some collections. Because you’ve
normally got thousands of people passing
through a building giving o moisture or
opening doors, once you remove this it could
result in an unbalanced environment.
“While our objectives from the pilot
perspective was to understand the data and
hit that predict and prevent target, we had
lockdown which went from monitoring a
busy to an empty building. But we went into
this as a ‘sandbox environment’ to learn
as much as we can, take those learnings
and turn that into some form of scalable
proposition for the wider heritage sector and
customer niches.
“We’ve been able to achieve that because
we’ve learned a lot from the work, how
particular sensors were installed, what can
work and what doesn’t work, and we’ve built
that into a proposition that we hope will
resonate.”
As a result, English Heritage is now
expanding the pilot to monitor energy
consumption and identify e iciencies at nine
other energy-intensive historic sites across
the country including Dover Castle, Wrest
Park and Brodsworth House.
Using the lessons from the pilot, English
Heritage will be able to monitor its buildings
much more closely to mitigate risk,
streamline preventative maintenance and
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