Your Smart Hotel · The ROI case

The Empty-Room Bill

Every night, your heating warms rooms nobody slept in. Your booking diary already knows which ones. Here is what connecting the two is worth — worked through honestly for a 20-bedroom hotel, then calculated for yours.

The worked example

A 20-bedroom hotel on mains gas

Take a typical independent: 20 letting rooms, ~65% annual occupancy, heated by gas radiators on a boiler timer. The gas bill runs £13–17k a year; roughly £8–10k of that is space heating, and about 60% of the heated hours belong to the bedrooms.

Line	Conservative	Typical	Strong
Bedroom share of space heating	£4,800	£5,400	£6,000
Recovered by heating sold rooms only (25–40%)	£1,200	£1,750	£2,400
Towel rails, over-heated rooms, open windows (clamp + auto-off)	£150	£300	£450
Annual saving	£1,350	£2,050	£2,850

The deal	Amount
Turnkey install (valves, hubs, controller, commissioning — one-off)	£2,000–2,600
Support & software (monitoring, maintenance digest, updates)	£400–480 / yr
Payback, typical case	~17 months — inside the second winter
Five-year net benefit (energy prices held flat)	~£5,600
Five-year net if energy rises 5%/yr (recent trend is higher)	~£6,700
Carbon saved	~4–5 tonnes CO₂e / yr

The sanity check a GM will do: £2,050 a year is about the profit of one good room-night per week. The install costs roughly one filled room-night per room, once. On oil the saving is ~30% higher; on electric heating it is three to four times higher.

Your hotel

Run your own numbers

Letting rooms

Heating fuel

Annual heating spend (£)

Leave blank to estimate from room count & fuel

Annual room occupancy (%)

Heating today

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estimated saving per year

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turnkey install (one-off)

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payback

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five-year net benefit

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CO₂ saved per year

Beyond the meter

What else changes

Warm rooms at check-in, every time — each room is warmed ahead of its own arrival, not on a blanket timer. Cold-room complaints (and the reviews they turn into) stop.
A morning maintenance digest instead of surprises: valves offline, dead batteries, rooms not reaching temperature — with room numbers, before the guest notices.
A ceiling on every radiator — the full-blast-window-open economy ends without anyone confronting a guest.
No corridor rounds — nobody tours the building turning valves on changeover day.
Green credentials with numbers behind them — 4–5 tonnes of CO₂ a year is a line for your website, your Green Tourism application, and increasingly, corporate bookers' questionnaires.

Proven, not promised: this system has run live in independent hotels for two seasons. We install it in one to two days, it reads your booking diary directly, and it keeps working when the internet doesn't.

How the numbers are built. Baseline heating spend estimated from UK small-hotel energy benchmarks (space heating ≈ 60% of fossil use; bedrooms ≈ 60% of space heating) unless you enter your own bill. Savings model: unsold-room setback recovers 25–40% of bedroom heating at typical occupancy (the calculator scales this with your occupancy — emptier hotels save more), plus 3–5% from towel-rail auto-off and the temperature ceiling. Fuel prices (Sept 2026, commercial incl. VAT/CCL): gas 7.5–9.5p/kWh, oil ~10.5p, LPG ~9.5p, electric 31–34p. Install priced at £100–130 per room turnkey; support £1.50–2/room/month. Carbon factors: gas 0.183, oil 0.247, LPG 0.214, grid electricity 0.14 kg CO₂e/kWh. Every figure here is deliberately conservative; your first winter's before/after bill is the real proof, and we'll show it to you on your dashboard.