Home / Smart Heating Retrofit Enhances Energy Efficiency and Guest Comfort in a Bavarian Hotel
CASE STUDY:

Smart Heating Retrofit Enhances Energy Efficiency and Guest Comfort in a Bavarian Hotel

🇩🇪 Munich, Germany

Our client

Building type: Hotel  

Client Name: Hotel Obermaier

Partner Name: Betterspace

Location: Munich, Germany

Building parameters: 2 buildings, X floors, 123 rooms

“The simplicity of the implementation convinced me – unscrew the old thermostat, screw on the new one, connect it to the network via mobile phone, assign it to a room. That's it.”

Nicolai Sauer, Junior Manager, Hotel Obermaier

About Betterspace

Betterspace develops smart software solutions that make buildings more energy-efficient, digital, and user-friendly.

With better.energy, users can make their non-residential buildings more energy efficient. The system automatically controls radiators and fan coil units, whether it is a hotel or office building, a clinic or care facility, or a school or other educational institution, better.energy reduces energy consumption.

The online management platform better.energy helps users manage their buildings. It allows them to keep an eye on their company, locations, devices, users, and better.energy modules, enabling the automated control of radiators and fan coil units as well as continuous monitoring of energy consumption.

Hotels also benefit from the better.guest digital guest directory. With its telephone feature, chat, push messages, green option, and ordering function, the digital assistant simplifies communication with hotel guests, helps generate additional revenue, and reduces costs.

With its intelligent software solutions, Betterspace creates digital, connected, sustainable, and efficient places.

Challenges

Hotel Obermaier is a historic, family-owned hotel in Munich, operated by the Obermaier family since 1863. The hotel's 53 rooms in its historic building relied on manual heating controls, resulting in unnecessary energy consumption when rooms were unoccupied. Guests often turned the heating to the maximum, and after their departure, the room continued to heat up for hours. In some cases, windows were left open, resulting in significant unnecessary energy waste. Looking to improve efficiency without compromising guest comfort or the character of the historic property, the hotel needed a smart retrofit solution that could be installed quickly, integrate with the existing heating system, and minimize structural intervention.

Solution

By integrating the better.energy platform with the existing property management system (PMS) and equipping the hotel's rooms with 53 Vicki LoRaWAN® Smart Radiator Thermostats, Hotel Obermaier transformed its conventional heating system into a smart one. The wireless retrofit was completed in just two days by the hotel manager himself, without structural modifications or disruption to hotel operations, making it ideally suited for the historic building. Through automated occupancy-based heating, rooms are heated only when needed, while open-window detection prevents unnecessary energy losses. Thanks to the better.energy platform, room occupancy and heating are now synchronized in real time – when a guest checks out, the temperature is remotely lowered by the Vicki Smart Radiator Thermostat. Conversely, when a guest checks in, the system preheats the room, so staff doesn’t need to intervene manually anymore. Additionally, the manual rotary control of the device allows guests to adjust the temperature to their comfort level, while letting the hotel management team set a maximum and minimum level to limit energy waste. At the same time, the device allows setting a precise target temperature in public areas, not allowing guests to override it via the “Child lock” functionality. Since the installation, the hotel has significantly reduced overheating, ensuring a comfortable indoor climate for guests while improving energy efficiency. Combined with the better.energy platform, MClimate’s devices help reduce staff workload, maintenance requirements, and overall energy costs, all without requiring structural renovations or disrupting hotel operations.

Results

35% reduction

of heating costs

Up to 10 years

of battery life

Open Windows

Detection

Supports FUOTA

Firmware Upgrade Over The Air

Gallery

Products in this case study

Vicki LoRaWAN® Smart Radiator Thermostat

Vicki LoRaWAN is a radiator thermostatic valve fully compliant with the LoRaWAN standard. It is the perfect choice for large-scale projects as it offers amazing battery life, RF performance and no maintenance for years as well functionalities such as Child Lock, Detection of opened windows and much more.

Recommended products

MClimate Wireless Thermostat LoRaWAN®

MClimate Wireless Thermostat is a stand-alone thermostat powered entirely by solar energy using an organic solar panel. The device features a 2.9" e-ink screen, sensor for movement (PIR), temperature and humidity sensor, LUX sensor and 3 buttons. The user can change the target temperature and see current indoor conditions. The device sends an uplink after any event as well as periodically.

MClimate CO2 + PIR lite LoRaWAN®

The MClimate CO2 + PIR lite LoRaWAN® combines an NDIR CO₂ sensor, a PIR sensor, and temperature and humidity sensors to deliver comprehensive monitoring and optimization of indoor climate conditions. Powered by two AA batteries, the device can operate for up to 15 years under default configuration mode. The data from the CO2 + PIR can be integrated into any LoRaWAN®-compatible system, including Building Management Systems, and exposed as datapoints in Modbus, BACnet, and KNX systems through a dedicated gateway.

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