In your own home you can always turn down the thermostat a few degrees if you want to save money on your heating bills. In a care home you can’t do this. Residents should expect to be warm and comfortable without resorting to extra layers of clothing.
With tight margins, care home owners are all too aware of heating costs and the need for energy efficiency. Excellent energy efficiency starts with the building design and the fabric. Adding or retro-fitting insulation and energy saving technology is expensive. The business case for doing it often doesn’t add up because the payback takes too long.
When it comes to creating new care home capacity, energy costs may be one of the few variables you can work with when it comes to running costs. But if you don’t think about it during planning and design that opportunity will be lost.
How Flexible Are Your Costs?
The number of staff you need will depend on the number of residents and their specific care needs. You are probably already achieving best value on supplies such as catering, laundry and consumables. So, other than energy, there’s not much to work with. Decisions you make about how your new home or extension is built can make a significant difference to running costs.
To have confidence in your budget for running costs you need confidence in the performance of the building. With the Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) used in Innovaré’s hybrid System, excellent thermal performance is designed into the panels. These panels then fit together precisely to make an airtight structure with minimal losses due to thermal bridging.
What that means is that the ‘as designed’ thermal performance is the same as the ‘as built’ thermal performance. There’s no risk that your new building will end up being too expensive to operate.
You might even end up with a more attractive business case because the thermal efficiency possible with the System will be better than you experience with current facilities. With an imaginative design that makes best use of solar gain and natural light your efficiencies could improve further still.
The final question is how to turn this potential into reality. That’s where you need a partner that can work with you and deliver the entire process from design to completion. Innovaré is the only UK manufacturer of SIPs to offer this end-to-end service. We also have significant experience in the health and care sector.
If you want to know more about how the Innovaré hybrid System and precast concrete floors can bring new care facilities on stream quicker, and make them cheaper to run, take a look at our website or get in touch on 0845 674 0020.
