The new building for the Marlowe Academy in Ramsgate, Kent, has been designed to be extremely energy efficient to heat and cool. Crucially it has a building management system (BMS) from Trend Control Systems, designed and installed by a Trend Partner company, Total Control Services Ltd, based in Tonbridge, Kent.
The heating and cooling system’s features include comprehensive monitoring and control inputs and outputs, motorised windows with individual control, passive atrium ventilation, plus room occupancy sensors and energy management control that delivers heating to each classroom space only when occupied.
The system can be accessed by authorised users for monitoring and scheduling from any PC on the school’s network. Internet access to the Trend system is built in and although it is presently disabled, it may be used in future to provide full remote monitoring.
The Marlowe Academy is a Performing Arts and Business Academy for over 1000 pupils aged eleven to eighteen. It is a result of a joint initiative by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), Kent County Council and a private sponsor.
The architects and consulting engineers, Building Design Partnership (BDP), created a building design that provides a superb environment for school users as well as for a broad range of community activities. It already includes the branch library, and is capable of expanding to host additional sports, academic and performance facilities with development of use by the community.
BDP wished to minimise the building’s energy consumption. Its demands were well understood by Trend Control Systems, which has a long and unrivalled track record of providing energy efficient building controls to schools and universities throughout the UK.
The building has six motor control centre (MCC) panels, five packaged air handling units (AHUs) each fitted with Total Control MCC’s by the manufacturer, and 14 small Trend IQ3 controllers to provide local control and management of each individual space. The Trend system communicates via site-wide Ethernet to a Trend 963 web-enabled System Supervisor: this well-proven Trend Supervisor can deliver pages to any PC on the network using standard browser software, for monitoring and control.