Woking College - Smart Plant Room Controls

Woking College operates eight plant rooms distributed across the site, creating a significant challenge for the facilities team responsible for maintaining heating and hot water systems.

Several of the plant rooms were operated manually, meaning that staff had to physically visit individual locations to check whether the equipment was running correctly. This made routine monitoring time-consuming and meant that potential issues could remain unnoticed until someone was able to inspect the plant room.

The existing control system also did not provide the level of monitoring, visibility and flexibility required by the client. The college needed a solution that could bring the different plant rooms together, provide a clear overview of system operation and make it easier to identify and investigate faults.

An additional requirement was system resilience. The plant rooms needed to remain operational even if communication with the wider network was temporarily unavailable.

We implemented LOXONE as a central control and monitoring platform for the college's heating and hot water systems.

The solution was designed using multiple LOXONE Miniservers, rather than relying on a single central controller. Each Miniserver manages its assigned plant room infrastructure locally, allowing the heating and hot water systems to continue operating independently in the event of a network or communication failure.

The system combines the Miniservers with Relay Extension, 1-Wire Extension, Analogue Output Extension, Modbus Extension and Digital Input Extension to integrate and monitor the various systems across the eight plant rooms.

At the supervisory level, the individual plant rooms are brought together into a single monitoring environment. The facilities team can use one LOXONE interface to see the status of each plant room and quickly establish whether the systems are operating as expected.

If a problem occurs, the system provides detailed information that allows the user to investigate the issue remotely and identify the appropriate action before physically attending the plant room.

This architecture provides both centralised visibility and decentralised control: the client has one overview of the entire site, while each plant room retains the ability to operate independently.
The solution was also designed with future expansion in mind, providing a scalable platform for further building integration.

As a result, Woking College now benefits from centralised monitoring of all eight plant rooms through a single LOXONE interface.

The facilities team can remotely monitor heating and hot water systems, identify potential faults more quickly and reduce the need for routine physical inspections.

Each plant room maintains independent local operation, ensuring continued functionality even if communication with the wider network is lost.

The solution provides improved system visibility, greater operational resilience and a scalable foundation for future building integration.