Tag Archive: Care Homes

  1. Sheffield care home slashes heating bills with HeatingSave

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    Abbeyfield Grange is a family run residential care home based in Sheffield, Yorkshire, where 19 people work. Managing consultant Paul Britain runs the business side, while his wife Zofia is the owner and manager. They decided to have installed a building energy management system (BEMS) on the home’s main site after receiving some very high bills last winter. Zofia explained: “The bills that arrived at the end of last year and at the start of this year made my eyes water. So we had to do something about it.”

    After making enquiries with one other competitor, they decided to choose HeatingSave’s BEMS after Paul became aware of the company when he attended a seminar run by the Carbon Trust. The Trust recommends HeatingSave because of its energy-saving products which reduce a building’s carbon footprint. The couple were also impressed by the HeatingSave website, which gave them pretty clear explanations of how the system worked and what its benefits were. (more…)

  2. Norfolk Residential Care Home saves on gas bills with HeatingSave

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    Avery Lodge is a privately owned Residential Care Home situated in the traditional east Norfolk seaside resort of Great Yarmouth. Owner Karl Hodgins runs it with his wife Sheryl, who is the day-to-day manager. It contains mainly elderly residents and like most care homes it proves very expensive to heat, doubly so as it is also an older building.

    The problem facing Avery Lodge was that the energy companies were raising winter fuel prices, some by as much as 9%, whilst at the same time the UK seemed to be heading for another long, cold winter. This made Karl realise that he had to do something about cutting the fuel spending whilst at the same time considering the particular needs of the residents.

    Karl explained, “The residents are mainly high-dependency. This means they have low mobility, so they are very sedentary and need a higher degree of heat to keep warm. The heating is on a lot – it’s on ‘24/7’. It was more of a challenge to keep costs down because the existing heating system only had simple, basic controls”, he added, “Because it is a large and old building, heating is one of our biggest outlays along with wages. We wanted more control because the building is split into two areas”. (more…)