Priva Case Study

Lancaster University

Priva Building control system just keeps growing

Keep Keen Controls Ltd is entering its fourth phase of building controls installation at Lancaster University, all supplied by Priva Building Intelligence.

  

The campus site comprises eight undergraduate colleges and one postgraduate college.  Most of the colleges have between 800 - 900 students and staff, plus there is on-campus accommodation.  Keep Keen has been involved in all four phases of the residential blocks; 27 to date with phase four concentrating on independent living accommodation.

Phases 1 - 3, which together created a total of 3,385 new student rooms, provide en-suite study rooms, studio apartments and shared social spaces in landscaped grounds, with the utilities included.  Sub-metering has been installed in each apartment block so that the university can calculate individual building energy costs.  Generally, these are occupied by first year students as the older students prefer to be more independent by renting local private accommodation.  The university decided to capitalize on this behaviour by building town houses and apartments where the residents are responsible for all of their expenses.

“The services are straight-forward domestic services; boilers, hot water pumps, radiators, and extract ventilation,” explained John Ward, Managing Director of Keep Keen.  “Originally, we installed Priva Compri HX4 controllers to manage the domestic services and these were linked together via the standard Priva communications network.  However, as the work progressed it became evident that the growing building control system would benefit from utilizing the campus Ethernet and Compri HX8 controllers, with inbuilt Ethernet communications, were added.  This allowed University Partnership Programme, the campus facilities managers, to establish a single operations station without installing a dedicated network between the 27 apartment blocks.”

The phase four development consists of 47 units, a mix of town houses and apartments.  Priva’s role is to monitor the utility meters, so that consumption can be recorded accurately and the results made available to the University for analysis and comparison between the accommodation buildings, utilities consumed, and to monitor plant for change-of-state and critical alarms.   
  
Keep Keen are involved in the controls design, installation and commissioning.  The company is also contracted to maintain the controls and has established a remote connection so that it can provide off-site maintenance support.

“This has been a long-running contract; we have been on-site since 2002,” said John Ward.  “A strength of the Priva product has been its ability to grow and adapt over the years.  Providing the students with independent accommodation is an innovative step by the University and the Priva controllers are proving yet again the flexibility of their design.”