Occupancy, opening hours and booking

Telling Properate when the building is actually in use — from opening hours and booking systems to people counters — so ventilation and heating follow reality rather than a fixed schedule.

Most wasted energy in a commercial building is spent conditioning space that nobody is in. Not through a fault — through a schedule that was set once and never revisited, and that assumes the building is busy from eight to six, every weekday, all year.

These integrations replace that assumption with information.

Opening hours

A building's opening hours are held in Properate as data rather than as a note in a document. That has two consequences worth knowing.

First, it gives you the energy use outside operating hours figure — the share of consumption that happens when the building is supposed to be closed. This is one of the most useful single numbers in the platform, because a high value points at something running unnecessarily, and unlike most findings it needs no expertise to interpret.

Second, graphs can mark non-operational periods and holidays, so you are not left wondering whether a quiet Tuesday was a holiday.

Booking systems

Visbook — a booking integration for buildings that are used by reservation: conference facilities, sports halls, cabins, teaching rooms. From the bookings it derives three things Properate can act on — whether the space is occupied, and the times of arrival and departure.

Arrival and departure are the valuable part. Knowing a room is booked from 14:00 lets heating start in time rather than at a fixed hour, and lets it stop when the last booking ends rather than at the end of a nominal working day. For a building with irregular use, this is usually the single largest saving available, and it requires no new hardware — the information already exists in the booking system.

Counting people

ViaMetrics — people counting, used mainly in shopping centres and other buildings with public footfall.

Footfall changes what a consumption figure means. Energy per square metre is the standard measure, but for a retail centre energy per visitor often tells you more, and it separates a genuinely efficient month from a quiet one.

Presence detection

Where neither a booking system nor a counter exists, presence can be inferred from what the building's own sensors already show — movement, CO₂ rising in a room, doors. This is less precise than a booking system but needs nothing new installed, and it is often enough to establish that a zone is empty every afternoon.

Schedules in the automation system

Occupancy information is only useful if something acts on it. The link between the two is the calendar: Properate reads and writes the schedules held in the building automation system, so a change based on actual use reaches the installation. See Building automation and control.

Worth knowing

Opening hours have to be right. The out-of-hours figure is only as good as the hours registered for the building. If it looks implausible, check the registered opening hours before investigating the plant — including whether holidays are set.

Occupied does not mean heated. The occupancy data arriving from a booking system is an input, not an action. Something — a calendar event or an automation — still has to use it. If bookings are visible but nothing changes, that link is what is missing.

Booking data is about spaces, not people. What Properate takes from a booking system is when a space is in use. It does not need, and does not take, who booked it.