“Our Edinburgh Outdoor Experience store has a single floor store layout, opening out into high roofed area with a ground floor café and gallery sales area; this open space had two issues; the gallery space being too hot during the summer, whilst the ground floor café was too cold for customers during the winter. We originally controlled the temperature with large AC units but the result was never satisfactory at either level. We installed the Airius system to move air from the high level gallery down to ground floor level, this brought the temperature on the gallery down to a comfortable level during the summer and resolved the cold customer issue in the café throughout the winter. The Airius system was installed during the summer whilst the AC system was closed down for servicing and we were happy to find the environment now comfortable without the AC running. As part of some trials we shut down the AC heating system and tested several thermostatically controlled wall heaters and found the temperature across both levels more than satisfactory with the temperature well balanced.
This has now led to the entire AC system being decommissioned with a considerable reduction in electricity consumption. We now consider destratification systems as a key part of our refits and store design for new openings. This helps us achieve improved customer comfort, operating efficiency and contributes towards reducing our carbon emissions.”