Municipality reduces energy consumption with smart radiator thermostats

Already at the beginning of March, the city of Hattersheim am Main equipped a day-care centre with 28 digital, self-learning radiator thermostats. The new control system ensures that rooms are only heated when they are actually used, leading to sustainable energy and CO2 savings.

The idea for the innovative heating technology came from the Hamburg-based company vilisto, which was recently awarded the German Innovation Prize for Climate and Environment (IKU) by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment in the category “Harnessing digital change for climate and environmentally friendly innovations”. The new thermostats have integrated presence sensors that detect whether a room is being used at the current time. If this is not the case, the temperature is automatically lowered. This saves energy without much effort. With the help of self-learning algorithms, the radiators are also controlled in advance so that the rooms are heated to the desired temperature in good time before care begins.

“The new thermostats learned the usage habits of our rooms within a short time and have been generating energy savings ever since. Many rooms now only need to be heated 30% of the time – while maintaining the same level of comfort for our educational staff and children,” says Hattersheim’s mayor Klaus Schindling. In addition, the vilisto online platform makes it easy to manage the radiators remotely and provides interesting insights for municipal energy management. “The heating of administrative buildings and educational institutions is currently done inefficiently. We are exploiting these savings potentials with the new possibilities of digitalisation and are pleased to make an effective contribution to local climate protection together with the city of Hattersheim“, says Christian Brase, Sales Director of vilisto.