The Guinness Partnership, Oldham

Optimising the working environment

In 2022, BAM was awarded a four-year integrated facilities management contract with The Guinness Partnership, one of the largest providers of affordable housing and care in the UK.

The Guinness Partnership has been around since 1890: providing great homes and services to almost 160,000 residents across the UK. As a charitable Community Benefit Society, any surplus the business makes is reinvested into its homes, communities and people.

As a socially responsible organisation, Guinness has a clear Net Zero 2050 strategy. This not only covers its housing and care services, but also its own office environments.

With this in mind, BAM has helped to put in place an innovative, sustainable system to monitor and dynamically manage energy, heating, lighting and air quality at the Partnership’s largest office: Bower House in Oldham.

Project details

Client
The Guinness Partnership
Facilities Management provider
BAM
Digital Experts
Integrated Buildings

54000

square foot office building

sensors covering critical systems

return on investment[

The challenge: maintaining a great working environment

The Guinness Partnership is passionate about being a great place to work and a strong business. A key element of this is to ensure a healthy, comfortable working environment for all the staff at its 54,000 square foot head office in Oldham, Greater Manchester.

Energy efficiency is also important to the organisation, not just when it comes to controlling costs, but also to power its journey to net zero.

The BAM solution: a rich picture of power, ventilation, heat and light

BAM is working collaboratively with Guinness and digital experts Integrated Buildings: using smart thermal sensors to provide live, in-depth data about how Bower House is being used.

The sensors are strategically located to create a detailed, dynamic heat map. Motion detectors also show which areas of the building are actually being occupied and used throughout the day.

Nine wireless sub-meters give a detailed picture of how much electricity is being used – in real time – by all the heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), lighting and power systems across the site.

BAM has installed another 37 sensors covering critical systems including air-handling units, motors and boilers.

The results: better energy use and better life at work

All the data generated by the smart sensors is consolidated into a cloud-based monitoring platform: so occupancy patterns and energy consumption can be accurately tracked.

This also allows BAM to design interventions that cut energy consumption, but always maintain the ventilation, lighting and heating at comfortable levels in the offices as they’re being used. Indoor air quality has measurably improved since the new systems were introduced.

When it comes to optimising energy use, all the decision-making is now driven by accurate, timely data. And the changes are automatically sent to the system controls.
As a result of these moves, BAM has achieved significant energy savings at Bower House.

Fewer manual interventions and less need for travel are also reducing Scope 3 carbon emissions, creating a more environmentally friendly workplace aligned with the Partnership’s vision of improving people’s lives.

“The project has changed the way we manage our building. We now have a consumption baseline to track optimisation in pounds and kWh. We can clearly see issues impacting energy consumption and carbon emissions, making it easier to develop solutions with data-backed proposals. And most importantly, we’ve delivered significant reductions in operating costs and have predictable utility spend.”

Chris Haney Head of Workspace, The Guinness Partnership