How to get your school’s heating set up correctly for winter
Are you suffering from energy bill anxiety in the run up to winter? Here, we share guidance on how to avoid energy waste by optimising your heating set up at the start of the season.
This year, we want to support as many schools as possible to get their heating set up right.
That’s because reducing your gas use is one of the best ways to cut your school’s carbon footprint, and it can also have a significant impact on your energy bills.
Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing some straightforward actions that you can take to keep your heating bills as low as possible this winter.
But to begin with, we wanted to share our top tips for optimising your heating set up to ensure that you keep people happy, healthy and learning while minimising energy waste.
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1. Get to know your systems
It might sound really obvious that you need to know your system well.
But it’s equally important to ensure that everything is well documented, and that more than one staff member knows how to cover the basics as well as how to access help if they need it.
We recommend that caretakers or site managers carry out a heating system audit and inventory check every autumn, to check that everything is set up properly and still functioning.
We have put together detailed guidance and templates to help you do this. The guidance prompts you to think about everything from your boilers to your thermostats, about who manages the different elements, and about what settings and controls you have. Anyone can use these resources, regardless of whether you have an Energy Sparks account or not.
TIP: If your school does have an Energy Sparks account, make sure you include our tool in your audit. As part of your checks, make sure that the data we hold for your school (e.g. floor area, opening hours, energy tariffs) are up to date, that you have the right people signed up to receive alerts, and that those who need to use Energy Sparks are familiar with how to use the tool – don’t forget, we offer free training!
2. Get to know your school
There are many factors that will determine what the best heating set up for your school looks like, and you know these better than anyone!
Think about things like:
- Term dates and opening hours – make sure you have noted down when the school holidays and inset days will be, and consider how this might affect your system set up.
TIP: Make sure that your Energy Sparks account has the correct opening
times and holiday dates listed, as this will make our advice more useful.
TIP: Make sure that if your school is hosting a one-off event (e.g. parents’ evening)
you have a reminder set to reinstate your normal settings afterwards .
- School use outside of core hours (e.g. events, clubs and community use) – think carefully about things like:
- How much heating is actually needed – e.g. if a club involves lots of physical activity, perhaps heating is not needed.
- Are you hosting these events and clubs in the best location? Or are they being held in the coldest part of your building or an area that is expensive to heat – if so, could you relocate them?
- For things like community use – are you charging enough to cover the cost of the heating?
- Do you have zonal control at your school? If not, is this worth investing in?
TIP: If you are using Energy Sparks, you can use your charts to work out how much
you are paying to heat the school out of hours. You can also
add your community use times, which allows you to look at the
cost vs income implications.
- Understand your hard-to-heat areas – which parts of your school are always cold? Do you know why? Are there any quick fixes you can make (e.g. moving furniture away from radiators, fixing leaky windows and doors)? Which improvements would require more time or funding? Documenting these things can help you advise on investment and upgrade plans for the school.
- Understand your radiator / heat delivery system – do you have a schedule for periodically checking that things like your Thermostatic Radiator Valves (TRV) are set to the correct level? If people keep adjusting them, can you get to the bottom of why this is happening? We have put together some guidance on this to help you take action.
- Does your school have any policies or targets that you need to be aware of? (E.g. net zero targets, heating policies) – If not, we recommend engaging with your leadership team to get some policies in place and communicated to wider staff, as this will make it easier for you to respond if people request changes to your heating settings.
3. Get the timings right
For a normal gas boiler with wet radiators, we recommend:
- Setting the heating to come on approximately one hour before the school opens to pupils.
- Switching off approximately half an hour before the end of the school day. You should find that the building will hold the heat well enough to keep people warm until they leave.
- Experimenting to find the sweet spot between it being too cold and causing too many complaints, vs too warm and too expensive.
With underfloor heating, we generally find that although it takes longer to heat the building up, most schools tend to hold that heat really well. So you almost certainly don’t need to keep it running 24/7 – in fact, many of our schools find that they can switch it off by 10-11am and the buildings stay warm enough.
This is where understanding your individual school comes in handy! Body heat and equipment can really affect a room’s temperature, so depending on how well your school is insulated, you may be able to switch your heating off earlier or look at heating the school in bursts throughout the day.
A couple of other things to consider:
- Make sure you are heating for when most people are in, not for the outliers – e.g. your headteacher coming in early.
- Most schools aren’t insulated well enough to benefit from running the heating during cheaper hours, so it’s worth understanding how your particular school gains and loses heat. We have found that night storage heaters generally don’t work well and cost schools a lot of money.
TIP: Complete our recommended action: change central heating operating times.
A note about using optimum start time
Many schools have their heating configured to use optimum start time control, which looks at outside and inside temperatures and automatically schedules the heating to start earlier in colder weather and later in milder weather.
However, we have found that this often doesn’t work very well – either because the thermostat is in a colder area, or because people try to do the calculations themselves (e.g. person thinks: “I want it warm by 9am, so I’ll put the heating on at 7am”, but the boiler responds with: “You want it warm by 7am? Then I’ll put it on at 3am”).
If you do use these settings, we therefore strongly recommend that you run some tests to check that it is working as expected – either by coming on-site early to check the heating isn’t on before it should be, or by looking at your Energy Sparks data.
4. Get the temperature right
When thinking about your school’s set temperatures, we recommend following the DfE’s energy efficiency guidance:
- Normal classrooms: 18°C
- Corridors: 15°C (unless you use your corridors for teaching, in which case treat it like a classroom)
- Areas with high levels of activity (e.g. sports halls): 15°C
- Areas with low levels of activity: 21°C
- Special needs schools or areas with very young children: 21°C
Other things to think about:
- Thermostats – where are these located (e.g. are they in a draughty corridor)? If it is easy for other people to change them, are they regularly monitored? If not, is that something you can ask your pupils to help with?
- Can you set up a system to monitor temperatures in your classrooms? Perhaps this is something that your pupils can help with. This doesn’t need to be expensive – it is possible to buy cheap cardboard thermometers.
- If you have a combined heating and cooling system, ensure there is a ‘dead band’ – we recommend heating to 18°C for classrooms, but don’t set your cooling system to kick in until the temperature rises to around 24°C (because cooling to 18°C will feel cold).
- Consider fan speeds – sometimes we have found that although the air temperature in a room is fine, the air flow is creating a wind chill factor. So if people are feeling cold, do you simply need to adjust fan speeds?
- Work with your leadership team to get a policy in place to cover things like room temperatures, use of standalone heaters, and keeping windows and doors closed. This gives you the ability to stand firm if you are getting requests from staff to adjust the temperature.
TIP: You can use your Energy Sparks data to help your leadership team make
informed decisions, by helping them to understand the likely cost and emissions
implications of e.g. increasing temperature, extending heating times,
or providing staff with portable heaters.
TIP: Complete our recommended action: change central heating set temperature.
5. Think about heating when the school is closed
Did you know: typical schools use 60% of their gas when closed to students and it’s not unusual for them to use as much as 70%. But as pupils are only in school for about 15% of the year, there are lots of opportunities to make savings without affecting the school day.
So make sure that your school is only being heated when it needs to be. To help with this:
- Ensure that your boiler’s frost protection is set up correctly – this will protect your water pipes without needing to leave the heating running when the school is empty. We have guidance to help with this. And remember – your building doesn’t need to be comfortable out of hours, you only need enough heating to protect your building from frost damage and damp.
- If your school has an Energy Sparks account, make sure you are signed up to receive our alerts – these will let you know if the heating is coming on unexpectedly out of hours, and allow you to tackle this quickly.
NEXT TIME…
We hope you have found this article useful. Next time, we will look at how you can use your Energy Sparks account to check that everything is working as it should be.
We’ll also be launching our Winter Heat Saver competition and other climate-themed activities soon, so be sure to follow us on social media, or sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with all our news and advice.
