Commercial · HVAC Control · London
Heating, cooling and airthat answer to one brain.
Most commercial buildings run their climate on timeclocks, wall thermostats and air-conditioning remotes that have never met each other. We put the boilers, the VRF units, the ventilation and the plant room on one locally-processed controller — zoned, scheduled, monitored, and honest about what it is doing.
What Goes Wrong
Four failures we findin almost every building.
The heating and the cooling fight each other
Radiators on a timeclock, air conditioning on its own remote controls, and both running at once in April. Nobody notices, because nothing is watching both.
The whole building heats for three people
One schedule for every floor means Saturday overtime in one office heats six empty ones. Zoning exists so the building follows occupancy, not the other way round.
The meeting room goes stale by 11am
CO2 climbs, concentration drops, and the response is opening a window next to a radiator. Demand-led ventilation fixes the air and the bill at the same time.
The plant room fails silently
A tripped pump or a failed sensor is discovered when a tenant complains, days later. Monitored plant tells somebody the moment a value goes out of range.
What We Control
The whole climate chain,from plant room to meeting room.
Zoned heating and cooling
- Rooms and floors controlled individually against schedules, presence and window contacts
- Boilers, heat pumps and electric heating staged and weather-compensated
- Setback instead of off: unoccupied zones idle low and recover before people arrive
- One interface for the whole building instead of a wall of thermostats
Air conditioning & VRF integration
- VRF and split systems from the major manufacturers integrated over Modbus or BACnet gateways
- AC and heating interlocked so they never run against each other in the same zone
- Setpoint limits and schedules that survive staff fiddling with wall controllers
- Existing systems integrated rather than replaced wherever the units are sound
Ventilation on demand
- CO2 and humidity sensors drive MVHR and extract fans by measured need, not timers
- Meeting rooms and classrooms ventilate as they fill and settle as they empty
- Heat recovery coordinated with the heating so fresh air does not become a heating bill
- Filter and fan health monitored, with maintenance flagged before airflow suffers
Plant monitoring & alarms
- Flow and return temperatures, pump states, pressures and tank levels logged continuously
- Out-of-range values push a notification to the right person, with the history attached
- Frost protection that acts on the actual pipework temperature, not the calendar
- Trend data kept locally — the evidence for every service-charge and maintenance conversation
The Other Half
Control decides what runs. Metering proves what it cost.
HVAC is usually the biggest load in the building, which makes it the first place metering pays for itself. The same controller that runs the plant can meter it per zone and per tenant, manage peak loads, and produce the numbers an owner, an accountant or an auditor actually asks for.
Energy management & meteringQuestions
HVAC control,answered honestly.
What is an HVAC control system?
It is the layer that decides when and how the heating, cooling and ventilation plant runs: which zones are conditioned, to what setpoints, on what schedules, and how the systems interact. In a small commercial building this is often nothing more than timeclocks and standalone thermostats — an HVAC control system replaces those with one coordinated controller, which is where both the comfort and the savings come from.
Can you control our existing air conditioning?
Usually, yes. VRF and split systems from the major manufacturers expose their controls over Modbus or BACnet, either natively or through a gateway, and once integrated the Loxone controller can read and set each indoor unit — setpoints, modes, fan speeds and schedules. The units themselves stay. The survey confirms what your specific kit exposes before we quote anything.
Does a control system actually reduce energy use?
The savings come from three places: zones that stop conditioning empty space, interlocks that stop heating and cooling running simultaneously, and ventilation that runs on measured CO2 rather than timers. How much that is worth depends entirely on how badly the building behaves today — which is exactly what the first weeks of monitoring show you, per zone, in kWh. We would rather show you the baseline than promise a percentage.
What happens if the controller fails or the internet goes down?
The logic runs locally in the building, so an internet outage costs you remote access and nothing else. Field devices are configured with safe fallback states, critical plant keeps its own safety controls (a boiler’s own high-limit stat is never bypassed), and frost protection is treated as a first-class function rather than an afterthought.
Is this a full BMS or just heating control?
The climate control described here runs on the same Loxone platform as lighting, access control and energy metering — so it can start as HVAC-only and grow into a full building management system without changing platform. Our building control overview covers the wider picture.
Let's start in the plant room.
A free survey of what is fitted, what it exposes for control, and what a coordinated system would look like — priced point by point, across London and the Home Counties.