Blenheim’s biggest battle?

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Blenheim Palace, a country house in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England, is one of England’s largest houses. Built between 1705 and 1722, the estate was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
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Ahead of celebrations to mark its 300th year, in 2017, Blenheim Palace committed to a five-year pledge to revolutionise its operations and become a net generator of green energy.
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Blenheim recognised that achieving this would only be possible by gathering the metrics needed to understand the site’s energy consumption and much more.
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That’s when the team at Blenheim Palace discovered Novacene and its ability to boost building performance - even in historic buildings.
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Boosting building performance
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Novacene’s proven process ensures that teams managing buildings of any shape, size or age can focus their attention on strengthening performance.
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Working in close partnership with Novacene, Blenheim’s team began by identifying the metrics to be measured, such as energy use, humidity, temperature and internal air quality (IAQ) alongside individual use cases.
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Digitally mapping out the spaces across the estate allowed Novacene and its performance-boosting platform to better understand the space, including individual rooms.
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Contextualising areas in this way does more than help the teams understand the metrics delivered, it helps the system, which is driven by machine learning, work with them, too. While a high humidity level within the building can be a cause for concern, in a greenhouse, for example, it is a desirable outcome.
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Futureproof capabilities

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Since empowering its operations with Novacene, Blenheim Palace has introduced 120 sensors across its sprawling site with focus on unique business cases - unlocking several new capabilities.

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Alongside wild bee and water quality monitoring, the system’s granular, real-time electricity monitoring, for example, does more than allow for cost reduction exercises, it enables automatic meter readings while meeting the future needs of the site’s green renewable energy strategy.

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Its temperature and humidity monitoring capabilities provide the team with a greater understanding of the environment collections are stored in: enhancing preservation. These also ensure the team can detect potential leaks, as well as fires, on site.

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Data from sensors throughout the estate also provide the system with details of whether rooms are occupied or unoccupied, ensuring internal air quality and that visitors remain comfortable throughout their visits.

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Benefits

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● Valuable insights and actionable data within 72 hours of installation
● Monitoring of wild bee populations
● Ensuring water quality
● Enhanced internal air quality
● Improved environmental detection and controls

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Client feedback

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‘’I thought that the Internet of Things was for modern buildings, offices and new developments. With Novacene, that’s not the case.

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“Novacene gives us a 360 degree view of the estate wherever we are. It was so quick to set up - within days we were able to understand our utilities bills in such detail that we can plan tangible ways to reduce our costs.

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“Next, we're now focussing on our collections – how monitoring and controlling environmental conditions can help to preserve them for the generations to come.

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“Who would have thought that there are so many applications for IoT in a heritage property. It’s so exciting to find a solution that provisions and provides such rich context around the data, and is so flexible and fast to deploy.”

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Forward thinking

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Looking ahead, Blenheim Palace intends to continue its journey with Novacene. As well as aiming to become carbon neutral on scopes 1-3 of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocol across all operations by 2027, the UNESCO site intends to remove 230,000 tonnes CO2e from the atmosphere by 2050.

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