St Edward’s School in North Oxford spans over 100 acres, combining traditional buildings with the needs of a modern co-educational boarding and day school. But like many large estates, its heating system was working harder than it needed to—warming empty rooms, ignoring changing schedules, and pushing up energy bills.
EcoSync partnered with St Edward’s to tackle this problem head-on. The result? A smarter, faster, and more adaptive approach to heating—cutting energy use by over 32% across the site.
The problem: heating that didn’t match real usage
Hybrid working patterns and fluctuating occupancy in boarding houses and classrooms meant that rooms were often heated regardless of whether anyone was using them. This mismatch between heating and real-world demand was costly—both financially and environmentally.
St Edward’s needed a solution that could adapt to its dynamic environment without tearing up its existing heating system.
The solution: retrofit TRVs + real-time insight
EcoSync began with a pilot in the bursary building—installing 18 intelligent, maintenance-free thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs). These smart devices were up and running in under a day, with each one recording 32 data points every five minutes, from radiator valve position to hot water temperature.
The devices fed real-time data into EcoSync’s machine learning platform, which predicted how much energy was needed for each room based on occupancy and environmental conditions. If a room wasn’t in use, it wasn’t heated. The result? Immediate savings—and live feedback via EcoSync’s Carbon Meter.
After a 38.6% reduction in heating use from the pilot, St Edward’s scaled up fast—installing nearly 1,000 devices across 10 buildings, including nine student boarding houses.
The results: 997 devices, 10 buildings, 32.2% saved
Between October 2022 and January 2023, EcoSync’s smart heating system saved:
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2662 kWh of energy
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538 kg of CO₂
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The equivalent of 66 trees absorbing carbon for a year
Their best-performing boarding house achieved a 44.7% saving, showing just how much potential there is when heating is matched to real-time demand—not guesswork.
Why this matters
St Edward’s now benefits from centralised heating control via a simple dashboard, with the ability to fine-tune room-level settings from anywhere. Staff and students are also part of the system—able to scan QR codes in each room to see energy savings in action, encouraging smarter day-to-day choices like closing windows or adjusting thermostats responsibly.
For schools, colleges, and estates with heritage buildings or complex occupancy patterns, this case study shows what’s possible: significant energy and cost savings, minimal disruption, and a tangible step towards sustainability.
Want to find out more about how St Edward's school achieved this energy saving? Click here to read the full case study.