- Home
- Schedules
How many hours a week are you conditioning an empty building?
No money figures here — just hours, worked out from your own occupancy against what the system is set to do. The cost per hour is yours to apply.
The check
An hour a day is allowed for warm-up or pull-down before occupancy, because a building that is at temperature when people arrive is the point of the exercise. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Hours a week
43 hours a week conditioning an empty buildingThe schedule already matches how the building is used, with warm-up allowed for. There is nothing to reclaim here.
- Worth confirming that the programme in the equipment matches what you believe it is — schedules drift.
- Check the weekend and holiday patterns separately; they are usually where a tight weekday schedule leaks.
- If comfort complaints are pushing people to override, that is the thing to fix rather than the hours.
A modest gap. Some of it is deliberate — warm-up, cleaning, deliveries — and some of it is probably nobody having revisited the programme.
- Compare the schedule against how the building has actually been used for the last month, not how it was used at fit-out.
- Set the weekend pattern explicitly rather than leaving it as a copy of a weekday.
- Where one unit serves a late-working area, schedule that unit differently rather than extending the whole building.
A substantial gap. At this size it is usually a schedule that was never changed after a tenant moved or the hours changed.
- Read and record what every unit is currently programmed to do — that is the starting point.
- Rebuild the programme around current occupancy, with a deliberate warm-up lead rather than an early start.
- Put holidays and closure days in as exceptions so they are not conditioned at full occupancy settings.
- Re-check after a month: a schedule that gets overridden daily has not been accepted by the people in the building.
This is close to running continuously. Whatever the reason, it is worth confirming before anything else on the plant is touched.
- Establish whether continuous running is deliberate — some equipment, processes or stock genuinely require it.
- Where it is not, rebuilding the schedule is the cheapest change available to a building, and it needs no new equipment.
- Check ventilation, freeze protection and any process requirements explicitly before hours are reduced.
- Do it unit by unit. One programme across a mixed building is what usually produced this.
Overrides matter more than the schedule. If staff are pushing the thermostats up or down every day, the programme is being fought rather than followed — usually because one area is uncomfortable. Fix that area and the schedule starts to hold.
Start by reading the schedule. On most buildings nobody has looked at the programme since the fit-out. Writing down what each unit is currently set to is an hour's work and it is where this exercise properly begins.
Four things to get right before tightening a schedule
- Warm-up and pull-downThe building has to be at temperature when people arrive. Optimum start does this automatically where it is available; where it is not, a fixed lead time is set deliberately.
- VentilationOccupied hours carry a minimum outdoor air requirement. A schedule that shuts ventilation while people are in the building is not a saving, it is a fault.
- Freeze and equipment protectionSetback limits exist for a reason. Pipework, stock and equipment all set a floor on how far a building can drift.
- Who can overrideSomebody has to be able to extend hours for a late meeting or a weekend delivery. If nobody can, the schedule gets disabled entirely.
