Berlinovo Apartment GmbH

Every year, we present the Sustainable City Award to customers who have achieved outstanding savings. This requires active and planned management and a thorough commitment to meeting energy targets.

For Berlinovo, the path to efficient and environmentally friendly buildings has been a long-term focus. In addition to the optimization by Edge, Berlinovo regularly works with the energy data to ensure ongoing improvement.

All these factors come together in our project with Berlinovo Apartment GmbH, the latest recipient of the Sustainable City Award (2021). Within just one year, over one million kilograms of CO₂ were saved.

The supervising Kiona energy expert, Janot Dohrmann, confirms: "Berlinovo is working in an exemplary manner to increase the efficiency of its properties without losing sight of the concerns and comfort needs of the tenants. This project shows how ecological and social factors can be reconciled. And last but not least, it pays off financially."

The starting point

Berlinovo Apartment GmbH manages approximately 6 500 furnished apartments in 31 residential complexes in Berlin. With almost fifty years of experience, the company is the market leader in the temporary-living segment in Berlin. But they faced the challenge of connecting different types of systems and collecting missing data from their properties.

The properties are heated partly with gas and partly with district heating via one-pipe and two-pipe systems. Tenant complaints could not be verified before the project began, resulting in high administrative expenses due to on-site visits.

Therefore, the project's objective was not only to realize savings through the algorithm but also to establish an energy management system that could be handled by the management team.

Installing Edge

With these data and objectives, the necessary sensor equipment was decided.

In the case of Berlinovo, 685 room sensors were installed in 30 buildings to measure temperature and relative humidity. Because the room sensors are wireless and easily installed inside an apartment, the customer was able to install them themselves, with telephone support from Kiona. The sensors on the heating circuits and the outdoor temperature sensors/data gateways (Edge Hub)were installed by a local installer.

Energy management "up and running" in six weeks

Within a short time, all buildings were online. The customer portal was set up with the data now available. Special attention was paid to the system's structure, and navigation setup according to the heating type. This makes it possible to quickly compare the consumption values within the respective group.

In addition to evaluating consumption and CO₂ emissions, an alarm was set up for room temperatures that dropped too low.

Berlinovo's energy management is supported by Kiona with annual energy analysis. Continuous savings potentials are generated by the algorithm. Thus, a large part of the portfolio can be left to self-learning optimization.

Results and outlook

Since the start of the project, the heating energy requirement has been reduced by an average of 19.8 kWh/m² across all properties compared with the reference year 2018. At the same time, over 1 million kg less CO₂ has been emitted to date. These figures are based on measured and weather-cleaned consumption values.

But the optimization path does not end here. Climate-neutral buildings involve a series of measures that must be planned and monitored. The Energy Target module is designed for this purpose: Based on the recorded consumption data, the path to climate neutrality is simulated via measures inside Edge. This way, it can be explicitly determined which action can be used to achieve the necessary CO₂ reduction.