An interview with…David Reed, Facilities Manager at Northampton Academy
Northampton Academy has made some phenomenal energy savings since the school joined Energy Sparks three years ago. Here, the school’s Facilities Manager – David Reed – shares the secrets to their success…
Can you tell us a bit about your role at Northampton Academy?
I have been at the school for six years now. I originally joined as an Assistant Estates Manager to support the Estates Manager with the day-to-day running of the site and team while he managed other things such as contractors, servicing, budgets, capital and health and safety (both at this school and two others that he manages).
I like my role, as it allows me to get into specific things such as fully understanding the heating and hot water systems, tidying and simplifying the emergency light testing, fire systems checks, the introduction of better Legionella controls and so much more.
David, with one of the gas-fired calorifiers the
school has been able to decommission (keep reading for more!)
What are your main drivers for reducing energy use – cost, carbon or education?
For me, all three are equal:
- Cost – Any reduction in energy cost means less money going out of our budget. The money saved can then be used for a better purpose. Although I had/have no say in what the school spends its money on, I would personally love any money saved to go to further energy saving measures such as LED lighting or to a self-funded education project such as harnessing nature and using wind or solar power to fuel something highly visible at the school.
- Carbon – I believe we should all be contributing to saving our planet by reducing our carbon footprint.
- Education – For me, educating staff and students that they can make a difference is the key to everything. It is the students’ future, so they need to understand and contribute. Saving energy leads to money that can be spent on enhancing their education – much better than continuing to waste energy and money on heating a room with no occupants to 25 degrees.
Northampton Academy joined Energy Sparks almost three years ago – what was your initial feeling about this? Did you get any surprises from your data?
Since I started in this role, I have always looked to reduce energy where we could, as and when situations arose.
In late 2022, United Learning sent an email out to its schools inviting them to take part in a trial with Energy Sparks to help reduce energy consumption and bills. They explained that we would need to have an Energy Sparks champion to be fully engaged in the scheme.
This really grabbed my attention as I was excited to be involved in energy saving and thought the programme would help me focus, so I agreed to join the trial.
I must admit that I was sceptical about the project, as I thought our school’s energy use was good – “What can they tell me?”
I genuinely thought we had good control and therefore only set a low energy saving target of 5% for gas and electricity over the year. I wanted to reduce energy but thought we may struggle.
However, I was wrong.
When I started using Energy Sparks, what surprised me in the weekly reports was the times we were using energy when there was no need – for example:
- Heating being on at weekends when we had zero occupancy.
- Ventilation and extract systems running 24/7 when they actually only needed to be on for 8 hours, Mon to Fri, at main occupancy times.
- External lighting automatically turning on at 2 pm even in bright sunshine.
Another surprise was finding out that our BMS (Building Management System) wasn’t always doing what we thought it was. I now know that it is a very common misconception that we all believe someone else has set it up correctly. Don’t believe it – check it yourself.
Comparison of Northampton Academy’s gas use over a week in early October 2025 (yellow bars),
vs a similar week – with similar temperatures – in 2022 (orange bars),
when the school had just joined Energy Sparks.
The Energy Sparks programme gave me the focus I needed; the weekly positive energy-saved results fuelled the fire and drove the enthusiasm.
Every Wednesday morning I await the weekly results with anticipation. If positive and a reduction – brilliant; if negative and an increase – at first disappointment quickly followed by “Why?” and then a lot more digging into the results.
How was your initial experience of using Energy Sparks?
The tool is very good and you do not have to be a heating engineer to understand what the building losses are; you simply need to look at the recommendations that Energy Sparks is providing and think: “Will that work here?”
The Energy Sparks tool made me look at and alter our occupancy times, as well as reducing/eliminating weekend and holiday energy use.
It gave me confidence and knowledge about what I could set classroom, corridor and office temperatures to. This also helped me to educate room users and explain why their rooms were set to that temperature. The tool has lots of guidance on what to look for.
I was aware that our out-of-school-time energy use was high, but put this down to numerous after-school lettings that required floodlights, lighting, heat, ventilation etc. My view changed very quickly when I saw our weekly results on Energy Sparks. After following their recommendations, we still had the lettings, but we saw big reductions.
These positive energy reduction results lit the fire even more and I began searching everywhere for reductions.
As mentioned earlier, the report allows you to dig deeper into the detail. When I first started, I would use the weekly progress chart to view how our positive reduction was clearly displayed on a chart. I would dig into the detail to find things I had not thought about – for example, changing any broken appliances for more A-rated energy efficient ones.
I could use the comparison tool (where you can view the same weekly period as the year before and see if you are improving).
We set up a Carbon Reduction Club and used some of the equivalence data (see image below) to get people’s attention – for example the amount of Energy saved last week could power x number of houses for x amount of time.
To be honest, you could look at the report for hours! I would advise working on the major quick gains first and then move on to the more challenging reductions.
Example of how Energy Sparks displays equivalence data on the pupil dashboard;
it is designed to bring energy use and savings to life.
What are the biggest energy saving challenges at your school? Has Energy Sparks helped you to overcome any of these?
Since I joined, we have faced many challenges in changing mindsets and upgrading this building.
Getting to grips with the Building Management System (BMS) has probably been the hardest thing. What I have found is that, although the basic controls are simple, a range of things – both minor and major – can go wrong.
Some examples from our school:
- Our BMS does not undertake a Spring/Autumn clock change, which can catch you out.
- In the summer of 2023, our BMS Boiler settings got stuck in winter mode and the boilers were repeatedly firing. Because it was summer we would not have realised this if it were not for the fact that the high gas use was indicated on the Energy Sparks report.
- Hot Water BMS/trend sensors were giving misleading low temperature results. This then resulted in us raising the temperatures of our water heaters to ensure we had Legionella prevention and our customers had the correct water temperature. We then found that the water at outlets was very hot. On investigation we eventually found that the BMS/trend sensor was on an uninsulated, exposed section of pipework and gave misleading information.
Not all of the above were directly spotted as a result of Energy Sparks, but the weekly results and energy-use graphs highlighted anomalies such as heating times not matching what we thought we had. The anomalies made us check.
Underfloor heating can also be a challenge. It is like old-fashioned electric storage heaters: you do not get an instant uplift in temperature or the physical feel of heat that you would with radiators.
This means that if the weather turns cold quickly you cannot simply turn the heating up and expect an immediate change – instead, you need to check and plan. Underfloor heating is a slow burner, you have to wait for the pipes to heat up the concrete slab that they are encased in and then the heat is released.
TOP TIP: If you have underfloor heating, David recommends
keeping a watch on the weather and tweak heating start-up times if needed.
To overcome this, I generally keep a watch on the weather and tweak the heating start-up times accordingly. This can occasionally reflect badly on our Energy Sparks report as it suggests that our heating comes too early when in fact it is running correctly and needs to heat up to be ready for occupancy.
The good thing here is seeing the information from Energy Sparks that our boilers may be coming on early but having the knowledge of our school’s heating system. The Energy Sparks system allows you to critically assess the recommendations you might get and decide what is sensible at your school.
The last thing I would say is that our biggest challenge here is human behaviour. We have to continually raise all staff briefings to remind people to close doors and windows, and turn off appliances when not in use etc. Human behaviour is the number one barrier to energy saving.
Northampton Academy has achieved some amazing energy saving results. As we move into winter, what advice do you have for others about how to optimise their heating systems?
Holiday period heating – We make changes to our BMS heating occupancy and temperature levels over Winter, Spring and Autumn school holidays. We check the long-term weather forecast – if it’s expected to be mild, we simply turn the heating off. As we have underfloor heating we know it takes a while to reach the correct temperature so we turn the heating back on a couple of days before all staff return.
As we move into Autumn and our heating is required, we check that all area room and BMS thermostats are correctly set to:
- Corridors – 15 degrees
- Classrooms – 18 degrees
- Offices or areas with sedentary movement 21 degrees.
We regularly check our thermostats, as some get interfered with – not by students but by staff! – and also stop the interference by putting locks over the thermostats.
We re-issue all staff notices that external doors are to be kept closed and, where possible, we take auto-door hold locks off. Keeping doors closed allows individual room thermostats to do their job controlling the heat and turn on and off as required.
We have managed to make big savings through better local control of our BMS occupancy times.
In the spring and autumn, when our heating is due to come on, we reduce the BMS heating occupancy times. In these months it is only cold in the mornings so we only run our heating for a short period.
In the winter we set the heating to be on so the building is at temperature when the majority of staff arrive, and set it to go off around 2/3 pm because (a) the building occupancy levels drop after 3:30 pm, and (b) the underfloor heating maintains the heat for a long time.
Electricity use is harder to bring down by ourselves, as it requires a community effort. However, the site team have made some good savings through reducing heating control times, and adjusting toilet and classroom extractor fans to stop the 24/7 use. We have also installed LED lighting and programmed information screens around the school to turn on and off to match occupancy times.
The reductions we have made are great news for our school, but for me it does come with a tinge of sadness that we and indeed millions of other premises were/are using energy where it was not required.
Have you made any changes that needed investment?
We have upgraded our lighting to LEDs with movement sensors.
We installed point-of-use electric water heaters to five of our six toilet blocks. The cost was outweighed because we took out three large gas-fired calorifiers that were in three basement boiler rooms – all three had over 50 meter pipe run to the toilet they were serving. The changes mean we are now supplying instant hot water at the point of use and were able to:
- Eliminate over 50 meters of 50 mm diameter pipework.
- Eliminate 50 metres of electric trace heating that was keeping the hot water supply warm.
- Eliminate the need to have large quantities of heated stored water that was never fully utilised.
- Eliminate the Legionella risk by having massive dead legs/dead ends decommissioned!
New LED lighting in the school’s library.
Is there any other advice you would like to share?
- The main thing for me is not to assume that things are working right without fully checking, take time to have a look. It will be worth it for everyone.
- I would recommend getting into the habit of checking weather forecasts and adjusting heating on/off times accordingly. I know this appears time consuming, but you will see the benefits.
- Look out for opportunities to change things – for example, if you have planned refurbishments, assess what you have and ask: “Is it needed, can we get something better and more energy saving? Is there a better option?” For us, changing large calorifiers for in situ point-of-use water heaters created a massive saving and actually improved the hot water service to the customer.
- Do not try to do everything at once. I would advise working on the major quick gains first and then moving on to other reductions. Definitely use Energy Sparks for ideas, recommendations and also see how your changes are taking effect.
- Biggest challenge is people. I managed massive reductions as I could make changes alone on our BMS system. Our changes and savings for electricity use are slower because you need to change people’s habits, I would strongly advise that you seek the full support of your Senior Leadership Team to embed behaviour change. Bear in mind energy reduction is NOT at the top of their agenda, it is viewed as a nice to have but education comes first. Don’t be disheartened – chip away at it, as every reduction is a win.
Want to learn more?
We are so grateful to David for taking the time to share his experiences and expertise.
If you’d like to learn more, we recommend:
- Blog – How to get your school’s heating set up correctly for winter (Prefer video? Take a look.)
- Blog – How to spot problems now your heating is on
- Our induction video series helps you get the most out of Energy Sparks. Video 8 focuses on reducing gas waste.
