Over the last few years, energy efficiency in hotel facilities has been singled out as needing improvement. For hotel managers, the amount of money spent on energy is significant. In order to keep costs under control, many are looking for effective solutions aimed at eliminating needless expense: overconsumption, waste, etc. The question of cost may be important, but over the last few years the environmental aspect of reducing a building's carbon footprint has also become a major issue.
Reducing a hotel's energy consumption is a real challenge, so being properly equipped is essential to being able to detect wasteful practices and other everyday sources of wasted energy. Being more and more sensitive to this issue, hotel managers are instructing their staff to limit energy consumption but guests must also do their bit too. To encourage them to adopt eco-responsible behavior patterns, you can start by installing card-reader energy savers in hotel rooms.
Their main function is to cut power to all non-essential electrical devices when the guest leaves their room.
In fact, it's not uncommon to see a television set left on in a bedroom or a light left on in a bathroom despite there being no guest in the room, so a card-reader energy saver allows you to stop such wasteful consumption.
This solution leads to a significant reduction in electricity bills, on condition that the guest doesn't find a way to trick the device by simulating their presence in the room.
Choosing the right energy saver is therefore more important than it may seem.
Card-reader energy savers are now very common and as soon as the room key is no longer connected, the room's electrical devices stop working, at least in theory!
In actual fact, these devices are very easy to bypass.
The reader is fitted with a dry contact which simply detects the presence of a card.
As a result, you can easily trick it by inserting a business card or any other piece of cardboard of the same size as the room key.
As a higher level of security, this system detects the presence of a magnetic chip similar to the one in the door reader. Even though more difficult to trick, it is not infallible.
This device looks for a chip of the same type as the one in the hotel's room key (Mifare, 125 KHz Q5, etc.).
To trick this device, you therefore insert a cardkey as in the illustration; a simple chip-and-pin card, professional security pass or even a subway/metro pass.
The only solution that a guest really cannot bypass is the smart energy saver, which is programmed to be activated only by the room key itself.
It is therefore impossible to trick this system using a card other than the one handed to you at reception on check-in.
It is absolutely essential to research the type of energy saver you need to install. You risk seeing the effectiveness of this equipment significantly reduced by having its initial purpose "bypassed".
Considering the impact on your return on investment and the small price difference between the different energy saver devices, it is important to examine these solutions in detail.
If you want to go further, you could find out about movement sensors for light fittings or even contact sensors for windows.
Designing an efficient and scalable access control system requires a global vision of a hotel's accesses.
This is why our solutions are so comprehensive, for all your accesses:
