Heating, Ventilation & Air Quality
The potential of adaptive heating controls for schools
Tom Sheppard, Head of Product at IMI Heatmiser, explains how AI-powered adaptive heating controls can help schools optimise energy use and maintain comfortable learning environments.
responds to how a school actually operates. Rather than applying the same fixed schedule throughout the building, the technology can adapt heating around planned occupancy, timetables and changing conditions.
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chools across the UK are under mounting pressure to control costs, improve comfort and cut carbon emissions, often across large, ageing estates with limited budgets. In response, smart heating controls are becoming an important consideration, from simple room thermostats through to intelligent, whole-school comfort platforms. But as the technology behind smart heating evolves, the focus is shifting towards systems that can understand how schools operate and adapt accordingly.
Why traditional controls fall short
Every school building presents its own heating challenge. Classrooms, sports halls and staff areas all have different patterns of use, often layered on top of ageing hydronic systems that were never designed with today’s energy costs or carbon targets in mind.
For estates teams, this creates a difficult balancing act to ensure occupied spaces are warm when needed and energy is not wasted in empty areas. As schools look to improve the performance of existing buildings and transition towards lower-carbon heating, intelligent control and heating optimisation are playing an increasingly important role.
Smart controls can help by using multi-zone control to direct heat to areas that need it, rather than heating the entire building to a single set point. Although this can give schools greater control over how and when different areas are heated, there are limitations.
Traditional smart systems are largely reactive. Pre-heat functions, for example, typically use historical data to estimate how long a building or zone will take to reach the required temperature. However, a school building’s heating response can vary considerably depending on factors including external temperature, solar gain, heat loss and thermal mass.
Learning how a school behaves
AI-driven adaptive heating takes traditional smart heating control a step further as it
24 Autumn 2026 issue 4185
AI-driven systems can learn how a building and its heating system behave by analysing factors such as how quickly the building heats up, the external temperature and weather forecast, thermal mass, previous heating performance, occupancy requirements and which zones will be occupied and when.
By bringing these factors together, the system can determine when heating needs to start to achieve the required temperature at the required time. A classroom, for example, can be brought up to temperature ahead of the start of lessons, and a sports hall can remain at a lower temperature until shortly before it is needed.
This enables schools to move to a system that responds more closely to actual building demand, helping to avoid unnecessary heating in unoccupied spaces while supporting stable indoor temperatures and comfortable learning environments.
Research into the benefits of adaptive heating is evolving. A 2025 University of León study examined an IoT-managed domestic heating installation and reported energy savings under the specific system, tariff and usage conditions tested. Although its findings cannot be applied directly to schools, the research provides a useful illustration of how real-time data and adaptive control can help heating systems respond more efficiently to changing conditions.
Why hydronic expertise still matters
Despite the growth of AI and smart controls, the importance of the underlying heating system should not be overlooked. Many schools rely on mechanical and hydronic equipment such as boilers, heat pumps, radiators and underfloor systems, with hot water distributed throughout the building. The design and performance of this infrastructure directly impact reliability, efficiency and comfort, regardless of the technology used to control it.
That means smart heating controls must reflect the characteristics of the underlying heating system, which is why heating expertise remains critical as schools modernise.
A smarter future
Looking ahead, heating controls are likely to play a broader role in managing the school environment in response to occupancy and changing conditions. AI is still an emerging technology, but combining connected solutions, real-time system data and intelligent controls is creating practical opportunities to address some of the heating challenges facing schools today.
For estates teams managing ageing buildings and tight budgets, this creates an opportunity to use existing heating infrastructure more intelligently, helping to reduce unnecessary energy use and maintain comfortable environments for pupils and staff.
marketing.uk@
imi-hydronic.com
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