Johnny Thomson 00:00
With the cost of heating bills more than doubling this year in the UK, village halls are having come up with some innovative solutions. Hi, everyone, I’m Johnny Thomson and welcome once again to The Village Halls Podcast sponsored by Allied Westminster, the UK’s largest specialist provider of village hall insurance and the home of VillageGuard. Now, we all know that energy costs have gone through the roof recently and this has presented a big challenge to community buildings up and down the country. However, Shustoke Village Hall in the West Midlands, has thought of a great idea that not only improves the efficiency of their heating system, but also makes it a little bit easier and more comfortable for anyone organising events there. Today, I’ve been joined by Nick Cole from Shustoke, who’s going tell us all about it. Hi Nick, and many thanks for joining me today.

Nick Cole 00:53
Hi Johnny. Well, many thanks for inviting me.

Johnny Thomson 00:57
Thanks for coming on. And before we get on to talking about how you’ve been tinkering, I guess, with the heating and the technology at the hall, tell me a little bit about you and what you do, and also your connection with the village and the hall there at Shustoke.

Nick Cole 00:58
Pleasure. Well, my background is in IT, which as we’ll come on to discuss was quite helpful with all of this. I’ve worked in IT in the corporate environment, but I’ve been a freelancer for more than 10 years as well. And these days, I’ve got quite a handful of voluntary roles that I undertake as well. So as, obviously I look after the village hall in Shustoke, but I’m a parish councillor in Shustoke as well. And I’m also a member of the Warwickshire Search and Rescue Team, which is a bit like mountain rescue, but in the lowland parts of the country. Yeah, so I’ve lived in Shustoke for… it’s, Shustoke is a small rural village in Warwickshire out to the east, sort of halfway between Birmingham and Coventry, which is much nicer than that sounds actually. There is a green bit in between. And it’s one of those villages where unless you’re sort of third generation, then you’re still a new boy. So I’m definitely a new boy, I’ve only been here about five years. But my partner Rebecca, her family have lived here for many years, so they’re much more kind of dyed in the wool. And we just live in a little cottage. It’s a village of only, I think it’s about 250 households, about 500 residents I think, so it’s quite small.

Johnny Thomson 02:33
And what’s your motivation to volunteer as you do?

Nick Cole 02:36
I guess you just get to that stage in life, don’t you, where… I know it’s a terrible cliche, but you know you do want to try and give something back. And, you know, harness the skills that you’ve built up through your career, but in a different way. Whether it’s discussing the heady matters that we have at the parish council, or working out how to raise funds for your search and rescue charity as I do.

Johnny Thomson 03:03
Brilliant, now the hall, I guess, a good place to start is to mention how it’s often unattended, isn’t it? And you hire out on a bit of a DIY basis? Is that right?

Nick Cole 03:15
Yeah, I’m sure this is not unusual. But it’s a lovely Hall, actually, it’s a sort of a Goldilocks kind of size, if you know what I mean, it’s not too big, it’s not too small. It’s probably about 100 years, it’s that sort of age of building. So it’s got a nice bit of character. But yeah, it’s unattended, there’s no, you know, sort of offices there with people who are there in working hours or anything. So, we have regular users who do things like yoga, pilates, after school tuition, music groups for toddlers, all that sort of stuff. They have regular slots during the week, and then we have one off users booking the hall for, you know, a child’s birthday party or a christening or you know, whatever you like really. So yeah, when people use the hall, I explain to them how they’re going to get into the hall and what they need to bring what they need to take away all that sort of stuff. But it’s all, as you say, it’s DIY and unattended.

Johnny Thomson 04:11
And this kind of way of working presented a few problems for you when it came to the heating system. Talk me through some of those problems Nick?

Nick Cole 04:20
Sure. Well, just to explain the heating system. I imagine again, this is not unique, but it’s a sort of two stage system, in that there’s a gas boiler, which looks just like a domestic, it probably is a domestic gas boiler that’s mounted on the wall. That runs on gas and it heats a little circuit, there’s one radiator and then the rest of the circuit just goes out to some warm air blowers that are in the main hall and that generates warm air that blows out into the hall. And actually it runs on it… we don’t have mains gas, so it runs on bottled gas. And this increased the anxiety about the problem, if you like in that when the gas just comes through a pipe, you know obviously you’re going to look at your meter and see the little numbers going round. But when you have to wrestle with five foot tall orange things, you’re very conscious of how quickly or otherwise you’re going to…

Johnny Thomson 04:54
It becomes very tangible!

Nick Cole 05:13
It really does, yeah I have to go down to the hall particularly through the winter, I’m down there at least once a week, checking to see whether the bottle is empty, it needs changing around, do I need to order some new ones, that kind of thing. So a, it’s a bit painful, but b as you say, it makes it really tangible how quickly you get through your gas. And the original system was just a thermostat on the wall. And when a hall user arrived, they would flick the thermostat from basically frost protection up to well 30 knowing most people who use the village hall, put it to a temperature, where the boiler would lurch into action. But then it would take, you know, 15 to 20 minutes for the system to actually warm up. And the blowers don’t start, the blowers won’t work until they’ve got a heat supply themselves. And so you weren’t actually starting to get warm air into the hall for, you know, 15 to 20 minutes after you’ve come in there, which on a on a winter’s morning when you’re about to run a yoga class is not great. And the other, I guess the problem that I started with with this is that it wasn’t difficult for people to forget to turn the heating off. They would almost invariably turn the warm air blowers off, but unless you turn the thermostat back down the boiler would still be on. And as I say, with the hall being and attended, it might be 24 hours nearly until the next person comes into the hall. So the boiler’s just just firing away to itself, potentially, you know, all night and all through the next day. And once that happened a few times, you really start to worry about how quickly, how much gas you’re using. And that was, you know, I’m going back a couple years.

Johnny Thomson 06:57
Exactly, now…

Nick Cole 07:02
You fast forward that…

Johnny Thomson 07:04
Yes, the cost of energy rocketing, I would imagine it’s making heating the hall increasingly expensive.

Nick Cole 07:07
Very much so, yeah, yeah. And so you know, what started out as trying to work out how to how to solve the problem, and have, you know, remote access to the heating basically, that’s where it all started.

Johnny Thomson 07:28
So you got your thinking caps on and came up with a great way of managing things by introducing a bit of technology, right?

Nick Cole 07:35
I did, yeah. It’s one of those situations where I don’t know, Johnny, whether you have, you know, a Nest or a Hive or whatever, in your home. But once you’ve had one, it’s one of those things that it’d be quite difficult to go back on.

Johnny Thomson 07:52
I’m a great lover of technology, but I guess there’ll be some people out there who have no idea what a Nest or a Hive might be. So that’s probably a great place for us to start, if you kind of explain very simply, what this technology is kind of capable of doing?

Nick Cole 08:01
Right, OK. Okay, yeah, well, in its most basic form, it’s a thermostat, which is connected to the internet, in the same way that your Alexa is, or a smart plug that can turn a lamp on and off or whatever from an app on your phone. So I’ve put… in this case, it was a hive, which is, I think it’s the British Gas one. A hive thermostat in my house, connected it up to the boiler. And that means that wherever you are, whether you’re in the house, or whether you’re at the other end of the country, or in a different country, you can turn your heating on and off. And you can set all sorts of schedules, and you can get it to alert you if the temperature in your house drops below, you know a particular temperature, all that kind of thing. It’s a great thing. And so with that experience from my home life, I thought, well, you know, this is obviously the way to go with the village hall. And I just started off by thinking, you know, I need to be able to control that heating remotely, because I don’t live far from the hall, but it’s a 10 minute walk at least. And if it’s 11 o’clock at night, and I suddenly think, oh I wonder if that person’s, you know, switched off the heating at the hall, I don’t want to have to trudge down there in the darkness. So that’s where it started. And, in fact, as we went into lockdown, it did that I’m sure many halls did, it presented an opportunity to tackle a few jobs that that would be harder to do when there were people using the hall every day. So I got an internet connection fitted, that’s the first thing that we needed. We didn’t have that. We had a phone phone line that wasn’t in use, so I just got that back in action so that we had broadband at the hall. And then in this case I bought a Nest, which is just the Google version of a Hive. It’s exactly the same sort of thing, and I just bought one so it was different to what I had at home, it was literally as simple as that. And connected it up, you basically connect it to your boiler so that the boiler is always ready to go. And when it gets the thumbs up from the Nest thermostat to say, right well I’m supposed to be on now, then the boiler fires up. And that’s where it started. And in fact, I think the first thing I did was I just put a very simple sort of automation on that, which was that 11 o’clock every night? It would turn the heating on.

Johnny Thomson 10:32
Yeah because I was going to say it would get a bit labour intensive, wouldn’t it, you’d have to look at the schedule… who’s coming when, try and turn it on before they get in there, try and remember to turn it off, if you’re doing it all manually, so…

Nick Cole 10:43
Yeah, so that’s exactly where I started. So there is a kind of heating schedule in the app that that comes with Nest. And you can set your schedule, but it’s all really designed around, you know, a nuclear family living in a house and going out to school and work and all that kind of thing. It’s not, it’s not really designed to, to come on and off at completely random times, just for an hour here, an hour there depending on when people are using the hall. So you’re absolutely right, it was quite, it was quite labour intensive, because I had to carefully set up the schedule for all of my regular users. But then every week, I had to check to see whether there was anybody else using the hall for a party or whatever, and put them into the schedule, and then remember to take them out again. And it all it was quite hard work. Well, not hard work, but you know, it was still not super convenient.

Johnny Thomson 11:35
And so you came up with a bit of a solution for that. And I guess you’re going to have to explain a little bit of modern technology, or app technology to describe what you did next, yeah?

Nick Cole 11:47
Yes. So that’s where I got to. The heating was coming on and off, driven by the nest, I could switch it on and off remotely. So we’ve moved forward, but it’s still not not ideal. And then for something completely different, I had done a bit of dabbling with a service called If This Then That or IFTTT, which is a really cool service and it’s actually very nicely set up with lots of sort of point and click, and it’s not very difficult to use, actually. But all it is, is a way of connecting, I suppose triggers to actions, or whatever.

Johnny Thomson 12:25
It’s kind of in the description, isn’t it? If this happens, or this or takes place then that is going to happen afterwards. And it’s a case of just programming it isn’t it to make something happen?

Nick Cole 12:41
Yeah, yeah. And actually, a really simple example of that is, as many people do, I’ve got a light in my lounge at home, which I like to come on in the evening, whether I’m there or not. But rather than like my mum’s got one as well. And she’s got a little one of those mechanical timer things that’s plugged into the plug socket, and it ticks its way around and she fiddles around with a little plastic bit. And the light pops on at six o’clock in the evening or whatever. But as the seasons change the time that you want the light to come on changes, whereas my one I’ve set it up with If This Then That, so it goes and has a look at what time sunset is in Shustoke and an hour before that it turns the lights on. So it comes on at a different time every day. So that’s a very simple example of how you can use this sort of thing. And the great thing with with IFTTT is that they have built loads and loads of integrations, which I guess is a bit of an IT word, isn’t it. But just, they’ve they’ve made connections with lots and lots of useful things. And when I started to look at this, I actually sort of started by thinking wow, this is going to take me five minutes because they have created a connection to Google Calendar and they’ve also created a connection to Nest. So I’m thinking well, great, if I create a Google Calendar and all that exists in that calendar is the bookings for the village hall, whether they’re regular bookings or one off bookings, then that’s my ‘if’ bit, that’s my trigger, that’s my condition that needs to be met.

Johnny Thomson 14:16
If there’s a booking…

Nick Cole 14:16
Yeah, yeah. And it’s literally in fact, it’s even better than that. The way you, when you set up that rule it’s driven by an event starting in the Google calendar that you’ve just connected to, and you can even tell it to sort of run for the condition to be true, 30 minutes before the event starts. So now I can get the heating to go on in time for it to be warm when the user turns up. That’s good. It would have been great if that was the end of my story, but in fact the Nest integration doesn’t work anymore. For some strange reason, because Nest used to be you know, a startup company, they built their own thing, and they had a connection with IFTTT and it was brilliant. And then Nest was bought by Google and for reasons not known to me, presumably Google know, but they decided to get rid of this connection to IFTTT. So I ended up, and I won’t bore you with the detail, but I ended up having to hand code exactly, sort of a native access to the Nest thermostat, which actually took me ages. It took me weeks and weeks of thrashing away this thing. But for example, I understand that the Hive integration is just you know, okay, so you’ve set up your Google Calendar bit, and then that piece is well tell my Hive thermostat to come on and it could have been as simple as that. So I think in hindsight, if I had done a bit more research and looked at how the automation worked before I set off, then I would have just bought a Hive and it would have been really easy. Life’s not like that.

Johnny Thomson 15:58
But in essence, what you’re saying iss you’ve been able to create a system… and there’s a way of very simply creating this, if you choose the right equipment, let’s just leave it at that. That when someone arrives to give like a pilates class or some other activity event, the heating is already up to temperature for them, which is great for them. And then of course, they don’t have to remember to switch it off, either. Because all of that happens automatically as well presumably?

Nick Cole 16:25
It does yeah, yeah. There’s another, you know, these are separate IFTTT rules. It’s very sort of granular, if you like, but yeah, there’s another rule that says when an event ends in that Google Calendar, then turn the heating off again please. And in fact, it doesn’t turn the heating off, it puts it back into frost protection mode. So you’ve still got that kind of protection if we had a really, really cold snap, you don’t want your pipes bursting. So yeah, yeah. And in fact, if we have users that overstay their welcome, then the fact that the hall starts to get cold, to remind them to leave!

Johnny Thomson 16:59
Very good.

Nick Cole 17:01
Yeah, it’s all controlled from the cloud. So yeah, it’s great.

Johnny Thomson 17:05
Now obviously, as you’ve mentioned, you’ve got a background in IT, I guess, you know, people listening about IFTTT and so on are now thinking well you know what you’re doing, you know, it’s very easy for you, but like, how easy is it in reality for somebody to set something like this up. And I know you’ve had your teething troubles as you’ve mentioned, by taking a system, you know like Hive, and connecting it to IFTTT in reality Nick, how difficult is this?

Nick Cole 17:32
Oh, it’s really easy. You know, this is, this is designed for non technical people to use definitely. I’m trying to think of a good analogy of how complicated it is. You know, if you can buy music to listen to on your phone, or do your groceries from an app on your phone. It’s just about…

Johnny Thomson 17:53
If you’re reasonably familiar with modern kind of smartphone technology, and using your laptop at work or something like that, then yeah, you should be able to handle this no problem.

Nick Cole 18:02
Oh yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s a very nice interface actually in IFTTT, and there’s, there’s sort of different categories of triggers and different categories of actions, and you just kind of browse through them and you can search and yeah, it’s, it’s very straightforward.

Johnny Thomson 18:18
And what about the costs Nick, you know for the hive system? Just roughly, you know, and setting up, and IFTTT itself? What are we talking about here?

Nick Cole 18:27
Well, your internet enabled thermostat, I think these days they are about sort of £150, maybe maybe up to £200. I can’t quite remember actually how much I paid for the Nest, but it’s of that sort of order of magnitude. And, you know, probably the most complicated bit actually is connecting the thermostat to the boiler, because every boiler seems to be different in terms of where the wires go, so you need an electrician to do that really. And then if IFTTT is free. I think as long as you, I think it restricts you to the number of different routines, or applets, or whatever they call them, that you’ve got active, but I think you get up to about three or four or five or something for nothing. So…

Johnny Thomson 19:13
So you’re pretty quickly going to be able to recoup your costs, in essence, because of what’s happened with all of the heating costs. I mean, what are you expecting, you know, your heating costs to be and what kind of difference are you expecting this to make over the winter months ahead? A lot more £100 to £200 I would have thought?

Nick Cole 19:33
Yeah, yeah. And obviously, you know, it just keeps it keeps paying back. I think, I mean it’s hard to predict your energy bills at the moment, isn’t it? But I think we’ll end up spending around £1,500 on gas through this financial year, if you like, which our year runs from April to the end of March. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we were saved, you know, 15% to 20% of that, which so 20% would be £300 wouldn’t it?

Johnny Thomson 20:06
Yeah, so in the winter alone, this is easily going to cover the cost of…

Nick Cole 20:10
I think so.

Johnny Thomson 20:11
And then you’ve got the long term savings that you’re going to make subsequently.

Nick Cole 20:15
Yeah. And it’s just, you know, it’s more convenient for me, it’s more convenient for the users. Yeah, it’s been really good.

Johnny Thomson 20:22
The thing I really like about what you’ve come up with there at Shustoke as well, is the fact that you’ve not only introduced something that helps with the energy efficiency and controls the costs, but it’s also something that improves the whole experience for the users of the hall too, because they’re under no pressure to have to remember to turn the heating off, effectively. And as you’ve said, you’ve set the system up so that it gets it to a nice comfortable temperature for people immediately their, you know, class starts. So all around, it’s just an absolutely brilliant idea Nick, and well done with this.

Nick Cole 20:58
Well, I wish I could say that, you know, I had this sort of fantastic vision of how this would unfold. But, you know, hopefully, I’ve given the impression of… it wasn’t like that. It was sort of, you know, one step after another, you just kind of you get to the next, you know, you suddenly think, oh, you know, I could do that. That’d be better. But it is good. Yeah.

Johnny Thomson 21:24
I mean, just through your experimentation, you’ve come up with something as well that sounds like it could, you know, be introduced by other halls. So if there’s anyone out there listening, you know, who is thinking of doing something similar. It sounds like, you know, they could quite easily achieve this as well.

Nick Cole 21:43
Yes, definitely, definitely. Particularly, if you’ve already got an internet connection at your hall. We didn’t, but then, you know, again that’s another benefit that increasingly people expect, you know, a community space like a hall to have an internet connection, Wi Fi so that they can stream birthday songs or whatever it is. Through lockdown actually, or as we came out of lockdown, some of the people that were doing yoga classes and that sort of thing, they were live streaming their classes that they were doing in the hall, so that if you wanted to come to the hall and do it in person, you could, but if you were still perhaps, shielding or whatever, and you needed to do it from home, then you could. So having the internet connection has been a great benefit as well, yeah.

Johnny Thomson 22:28
Great stuff. And thanks for your honesty, by the way, for you know, not trying to backtrack and saying that you have this wonderful, all encompassing idea, but that you really just made it up as you went along.

Nick Cole 22:40
Isn’t that always the best way?

Johnny Thomson 22:41
It is? Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. It’s how we do the podcast, of course, as well. Excellent. Well, I’m also delighted to announce that Shustoke Village Hall has also been nominated for our Wonderful Village’s Innovation Award for what they’ve been doing with the heating system there. So good luck with that Nick, when the judges start looking at all of the awards entries that they’ve received very soon.

Nick Cole 23:09
Thank you very much. Yeah. Fingers crossed.

Johnny Thomson 23:11
Yeah. Yeah. No, well done. And thanks again for for coming on and talking about this. Yeah. As I said, I hope halls listening in, you know, pick up on this idea and look at whether it’s something that could work for them, too.

Nick Cole 23:23
Yeah, the more people that can can use this sort of thing, the better I’m sure, yeah.

Johnny Thomson 23:28
Yeah, definitely. And that’s the whole idea as well, behind the Innovation Award of course, is you know, we can share some ideas across the fantastic village hall network that’s out there. So brilliant, thanks again, Nick.

Nick Cole 23:41
No, that’s my pleasure. And I would hope that, you know, other people will pick up with this, you know, pick, pick this up and run with it and come up with, you know, the next, the next stages, the next improvements, I’d really be really interested to hear what other people then go, oh, well, if you’ve got that far, you can do this. Yeah. So hopefully, I’ll benefit from that as well.

Johnny Thomson 24:02
Perfect. Well, yeah, yeah. If you’ve got any ideas on how the system can be developed further, drop us an email, you can find all of the contact information on our website. Thanks again, Nick. And that’s, that’s it, I guess for for this episode. A reminder, talking about the Wonderful Villages Awards, that the 2022 entries close very soon on the 31st October. So if you haven’t entered already, get in quick. And thanks, by the way to everyone who’s entered already.If you haven’t heard from us yet, we’ll be acknowledging your entries in the coming weeks. And we’ll also be back soon to explain exactly what will be happening next with the judging and when you can expect to hear the results of this year’s awards, and the five halls that will each be receiving £1,000. Thanks as always to our headline sponsor and specialist insurance provider Allied Westminster for making our podcast possible and whose services you can discover more about at villageguard.com. And to online booking system provider Hallmaster who also sponsor our podcast and can be found at hallmaster.co.uk You’ve been listening to The Village Halls Podcast, a unique listening community for Britain’s village church and community halls and anyone interested in the vital community services they provide. We’ll be back again soon with another episode, so please visit thevillagehallspodcast.com to subscribe, sign up for updates, link through to our social media pages and just to find out more, but until next time, goodbye for now.