Warm Church

The Warm Church system is aimed at the very specific heating demands of churches and other buildings that have sporadic occupancy but need to be warm enough when they are occupied. This is true of chapels, village halls and the like. Such buildings have other requirements:

  • They are often run on a tight budget
  • They need a minimum level of warmth to maintain the fabric and prevent burst pipes and similar
  • They do not have regular staff
  • Their occupancy is irregular or is a mix of regular (for example bowling night on Thursdays from 7pm to 9.30pm) and irregular ( a wedding reception in three month’s time from 12.30pm to 5pm). This cannot be catered for with a typical central heating controller.

The usual way of handling the irregular heating load is for someone to come in and set the central heating to come on as appropriate. With a seven day controller this visit needs only to be weekly but it is nevertheless error prone. If the heating is not switched on then the congregation sits and shivers through the sermon. If it is left on accidentally then the Treasurer gets annoyed at the extra heating bills.

Warm Church handles this by accessing your building’s events calendar over the internet (we provide a mobile internet plugin if your building doesn’t have internet connectivity), working out the next event and then using a dynamic model of your building to work out when to turn the heating on. This model is refined over time and uses the inside and outside temperature of the building to work out how long to allow it to warm up. So your users are warm and your treasurer is happy, knowing that the heating is coming on for just the right amount of time. And as long as your calendar is kept up to date, you can be assured that your church will always be warm on time. Warm Church can use any calendar that is published in ICAL form (which includes the “A Church near You” calendar, and Google calendar).

So, your users/congregation are warm, your caretaker/churchwarden can sleep in and your treasurer is happy. And the world is a slightly better place.