A school building has a simple job. It should be warm when pupils arrive, and off when they have gone home. Around that sit clubs, evening events, exams, holidays and half terms, and a heating schedule that was set once and rarely checked again.
That is why education is one of the four kinds of building we know best. Schools are term-time buildings on schedules nobody rechecked, and the people who run them have plenty else to do.
GridEdge connects to your meters and to the system that runs your heating and cooling, and each morning gives the site team the top three things to do. Cold classrooms, stuck valves and heating left on are found before a teacher calls.
Each action is in plain words: what is wrong, where, and what to do first. A person checks it before it reaches you. For each one, the team can action it, ask a question, look into it on site, or decline it and tell us why.
On a Monday morning, a trust's list might read:
The order matters. Comfort comes first, then cost, then carbon. A cold classroom gets fixed before anyone looks at the sports hall's evening hours.
With half term coming, it is worth asking a plain question: will the buildings know the pupils have gone? If the boilers run through the holiday as if it were a school day, that energy heats empty rooms.
This is the kind of thing that lands on the list. It is hard to spot from the office, and once someone sees it, it can be put right.
Before the break, a few questions are worth ten minutes with whoever looks after the heating controls:
None of these needs new kit. They need someone to look, and a list that reminds them where.
For a trust, the job multiplies. Every building is different. One is too hot. One never switches off. GridEdge learns how each one should run, and flags the ones that don't.
All of it sits on one page, school by school, with the most urgent action first. Each school joins the list when it connects. An estates lead sees every school in one place, with the most urgent problems at the top.
Nothing changes in a school without a yes. A person checks every recommendation first. Then the site team can make the change with the steps laid out, or your FM provider or our partners can do it as part of the contract.
For a school, energy that isn't wasted is money that stays in the budget. Every pound off the energy bill stays in the classroom.
Getting started doesn't need new hardware. It starts with an energy bill. More on how we work with schools is on our schools and trusts page.
Before half term, find out whether your school could save energy. Answer six quick questions, in about a minute, for free. See if your building could save energy.