THE HEIGHTS Leisure Centre in Sandown has gone from conventional to connected in an EU pilot scheme.

A Siemens Navigator platform has been installed alongside existing infrastructure, helping staff and project partners better understand how the building operates and where it can be improved for energy and comfort.

Siemens and the IW Council chose the leisure centre as a pilot, to see whether energy demand could be reduced, and use the findings to evaluate how smart building management systems can be incorporated into existing infrastructure.

The project will provide valuable data to an EU-wide study analysing how the smart cities of the future may operate.

Siemens’ engineers, working in conjunction with local controls and automation engineers from FW Marsh, integrated the existing building control and energy infrastructure with a smart building management system.

The work, part of the ongoing EU-funded InteGRIDy project, included analysis of how the centre’s building management system worked, looking at where improvements could be made, and which loads could benefit from remote demand response control.

To analyse the data, the team installed the cloud-based Siemens Navigator system, which began to provide engineers with 18,000 new readings from 60 data points daily.

This could lead to more comfortable temperatures, reduced energy bills and reduced carbon emissions.

Mark Byvelds, energy engineer from Siemens Building Technologies, said: “This has been an incredible project to work on which has started a conventional leisure centre on the journey to becoming a smart and connected building.

“We live in a world of big data where buildings and more importantly, their occupants, have a great opportunity to benefit from detailed analysis of this data.

“This project demonstrates how a conventional building can become a smart building and proves that existing buildings can become easily connected with the right know-how.”

The IW Council’s cabinet member for environment and heritage, Cllr John Hobart, said: “We are very pleased to be supporting this innovative approach to understanding the energy used by council facilities, and the potential for closer control of our systems offers great opportunities for reduced running costs and a more comfortable environment for users.”