How can you keep energy costs in your venue down? This is a burning question on the minds of many who work in the Arts and Culture Industry. CCHA tested out a solution for you. A Yesplan integration with your heating system could save you money, energy and time.
The Arts and Culture Industry has been sounding the alarm because of the skyrocketing energy prices. For example, Antwerp's largest venue Sportpaleis saw its yearly energy costs increase by a whopping two million euros. Event organisers may be forced to increase ticket prices, even though visitors face the same challenges in keeping their budget afloat.
But difficult times require creative solutions. A Scottish nightclub stores the body heat of dancers for later use to heat the venue. However, not every venue has sweaty dancers at their disposal. To preserve your dancers, we offer you our Yesplan integration for keeping your energy costs down.T
Cultural Centre Hasselt (CCHA) leads the way. With over 300 events and 200.000 visitors every year, they are one of Belgium’s biggest cultural centres. Technical Director Erwin Grommen tells us more about their energy-saving solution which they set up three years ago.
Before they had the integration with their HVAC system (Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning), CCHA appointed a single person whose responsibility was to focus on saving energy.
“This colleague wasted a lot of time manually programming the heating according to the event schedules, so we didn’t heat our spaces unnecessarily” recalls Erwin.
“Of course, this was a time-consuming endeavour. So we started using a new building management system (Priva) for our HVAC installation. And because this system can import external data, we could integrate it with Yesplan.”
“Priva pulls the hours and locations from Yesplans event planner. Our building management system upholds a certain logic to decide when to start which system. If, for example, a concert starts at 8 PM in the large hall and the outside temperature is 10°C, then the system knows automatically when to start heating the location” Erwin explains.
“We had conversations with the rest of the team, to decide for which type of events we’d want to turn on the heating. Thanks to the connectivity with Yesplan, the heating system functions independently now.”
The integration allows for plenty more options to maximise your energy savings. “In the future, I would like to differentiate between Yesplan profiles (= the type of event). With this change, we could send the profile of an external event to the heating system, but withhold sending our internal activities. At internal activities, such as meetings, we ask our colleagues to put on an extra sweater” says the Technical Director of CCHA.
“We’ve already made a distinction between heating the stage and heating the area where the seats are. For example, the seating area only gets heated during the show. The stage on the other hand also gets heated before and after the show, for the stagehands. We would also like to apply this feature for rehearsals” Erwin explains.
CCHA is ecstatic about the connection between Yesplan and Priva.
“Thanks to the integration we no longer have to manually scroll through schedules, which is a huge time saver in itself. Most cultural centres come from a situation where they’re heating the entire venue at all times. If that was the case for us, the amount of money saved would have been astronomical. Especially taking into account that heating, ventilation, and air conditioning are the biggest overhead costs for any cultural venue,” Erwin concludes.
“The only downside? We’ve had integration for over three years now, so well before the current energy crisis hit. We were already doing our very best concerning energy efficiency, so unfortunately there’s not much we can improve anymore (laughs).”
Contact the supplier of your building management system and check what possibilities they have for integrating with other systems. Details about our API can be found here.
Save resources of any kind! Set up a free call with one of our experts to see if our solution can help your venue.
