When the COVID 19 pandemic hit in early 2020 the Byrne family, consisting of celebrity chef Aiden Byrne and his wife Sarah, chose to withdraw their involvement from the Black Friar pub in Manchester to prioritise their efforts and focus into their country pub in Lymm, Cheshire.
Throughout the first lockdown they worked endlessly to revamp the existing Church Green pub and expand with a new external Pavilion area and new Delicatessen, offering homemade food, which has been a great success for supplying the community over the lockdown periods.
We at Climate were excited to put forward our ideas when the Byrne family contacted us for advice and help with the transformation. We initially met with Aiden and Sarah to talk about their vision to further cement The Church Green as a destination Pub, Deli, Events and Wedding Venue in the minds of its existing customers as well as new customers. The brief was to work with the enhanced brand vision and business objectives and put forward a design that delivered on the vision, aesthetics, and sustainability for the proposed works. It was important to ensure the design was aesthetically pleasing and created a perfect environment for their customers, equally vital to the family was sustainability. They knew that Climate Energy Group had expertise in sustainability and controls, so we worked together to ensure the design and installation was client friendly but also environmentally friendly and of course Covid safe, given the circumstances.
Our teams began by designing a controls solution that would minimise the need to control assets manually, this included installation of controls hardware and a bespoke software program, which allows us to optimise the use of installed external heaters by creating zones and adding sensors and timers to each of these zones. We also gave the service staff the ability to override all heaters to gain full control of the ambient surrounding in the pavilion when operations required. In addition to this we installed new festoon and track lighting to the pavilion area and also additional festoon to the exterior of the new Deli and we fitted new LED signage and flood lights to the front facing and pedestrian pub entrance, again it was essential to zone the lighting through our bespoke controls panel, meaning each area is controlled individually. When it came to customer areas, we understand the ambience created in these settings is of the utmost importance, so we helped to source lamps with just the right light output and colour temperature between 1,800-2,200k (degrees kelvin) for the festoon, whereas for the track lighting we chose 2,700k . It goes without saying these were also the most efficient LEDs available for the job having a very high lumens per watt output.
In The Deli our teams completed a full installation of lighting and power, including fitting of new distribution fed via a new section board located in the cellar allowing for easy future expansion (there are still more plans afoot!) The internal lighting was a mixture of pendant and track lighting, we used higher output track lights that allowed us to highlight produce display areas. Externally we used the same controls philosophy for The Deli festoon lighting as we did for the Pavilion as we wanted to create a holistic approach to the background ambient lighting, this method allowed us to keep the facade of pub illuminated past closing hours. Whilst carrying out the works we found various legacy upgrades were required to the existing dining area which we completed throughout our time on site with minimal disruption to operations, including fitting extract ventilation in the kitchen complete with a gas safety system.
Our controls hardware enables us to monitor all controlled assets remotely, including the ability to monitor and log fridge temperatures if required, this feature records fridge temperatures on a continuous basis which takes away the responsibility from staff as they are required by law to keep a log for food safety reasons.
Savings
Even though energy consumption has gone up overall due to the installation of the new exterior pavilion heaters we have kept the running cost to a minimum and estimate with the addition of our bespoke controls system the Byrne’s will benefit from a 70% reduction of costs compared to no controls being installed totaling a saving of over £9,000 per annum not to mention the Kilowatt and carbon savings.
We have thoroughly enjoyed working on this project and are proud to have created a stylish yet environmentally friendly area for all to enjoy when The Church Green, can safely re-open its full operation, we certainly can’t wait to visit.
Our teams adhered to strict COVID-19 guidelines throughout the project.
Tuesday 16th March 2021