Subsidy of € 200,000 granted to Hero Balancer & INGY!

June 4, 2020

Hero Balancer and INGY have received a subsidy of € 200.000 for their project “Creating a decentralized building management system” from the Rijksdienst voor Ondernemers (RVO). Stefan Kloosterboer, CCO Hero Balancer: “We are very happy with this. This subsidy enables us to make any building in the Netherlands, from primary school to office building, very energy efficient and cost-efficient smart”. Bastiaan de Groot, CEO INGY adds: “By linking our systems and data, we are setting the new standard in making existing buildings more sustainable and smart. The marginal investment recovers many times over by making more effective use of energy and the assets in a building”.

Wasting energy

De Groot and Kloosterboer met through Holland Contech and Proptech (HCP), the ecosystem for innovative companies active in construction, renovation and management. Their two visions of smarter and more effective energy management appeared to coincide, on which they wrote a project plan and applied to the RVO for a subsidy.

The system that the two companies are developing together is desperately needed, as research by Hero Balancer and SmartDodos last January showed. Stefan Kloosterboer, CCO Hero Balancer: “71% of the utility buildings heated last Christmas and New Year’s Day as if they had been working. In most of the installations we come across, including gas-free A++ buildings, we see waste outside operating hours. This really has to stop, we can no longer afford this waste of energy in 2020”.

1 + 1 = 5

Hero Balancer makes software that enables it to control climate installations fully automatically and thus achieve energy savings of between 10% – 35%. INGY makes buildings smart by replacing the lighting infrastructure, adding sensors and connecting them via a scalable mesh network. This provides very interesting data that can be used to manage assets more effectively, but also to measure presence, temperature and CO2, for example.

By linking an INGY smart-lighting system to Hero Balancer, office owners, care institutions, schools and other users of commercial buildings can achieve significant additional energy savings: Automatic adjustment of the start and end time of the climate installations by Hero Balancer based on historical INGY sensor data about actual presence within the building. Automatic shutdown of the HVAC for (parts of) the building if part of the building is empty. Controlling the air conditioning depending on the occupancy of the building .

The first tests are currently being done at the HCP Clubhouse in Amsterdam. The integration is one of the first steps in the development of a decentralized cloud building management system which is fed with data through the mesh network. The goal of the project is to achieve a fully decentralized solution to replace a building management system. In such a solution there is no longer a need for central control hardware which makes the solution much more cost efficient, removes the single point of failure and makes the system more suitable for medium-sized buildings, which now often operate without an integrated building management system. In addition, every installer can easily install this system himself, without the help of system integrators.

Expected savings

Both companies expect to achieve additional energy savings of between 10% and 20% on the HVAC energy consumption, on top of the 23% energy savings on heating & ventilation that Hero Balancer normally achieves and the 30-70% savings that Ingy normally achieves on lighting. 

For more information about the solution, installers and end users can contact their representative at Hero Balancer, Ingy or their partners.

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