National Trust

The Challenge

National Trust and heritage sites rely on carefully maintained heating, cooling, and control systems to protect historic buildings, sensitive interiors, collections, and visitor environments. These estates often operate across multiple buildings and plant areas, so any failure in heat pumps, ventilation plant, controls, or monitoring infrastructure can affect asset condition, energy performance, and operational resilience.

Planned preventative maintenance is therefore critical not only for reliability, but also for ensuring plant continues to operate as designed and in a way that supports conservation objectives and cost control. At the same time, remote access and monitoring services must be delivered securely, with clear scope, controlled access, and strong protection of internet-facing connections to reduce cyber risk across operational technology and building systems.

What We Deliver

A structured maintenance and operational support package is provided for heritage and National Trust-style estates, covering heat pumps, HVAC plant, controls systems, and secure remote monitoring infrastructure. The service is designed to protect critical equipment, improve visibility of plant performance, and support long-term resilience across occupied and conservation-sensitive sites.

Technical Scope:

• Planned preventative maintenance for heat pumps, ventilation plant, pumps, sensors, meters, and associated controls systems.

• Routine inspection, testing, and servicing to maintain safe and efficient system operation.

• Controls support to ensure systems continue to operate in line with design intent and conservation requirements.

• Secure remote monitoring connections for alarms, diagnostics, and performance oversight, implemented with cyber security in mind.

Key Technical Activities

• Scheduled PPM visits aligned with site access requirements, visitor operations, and conservation constraints.

• Inspection of plant condition, electrical health, refrigeration performance, hydraulic operation, sensors, valves, and control interfaces to identify early signs of wear or inefficient operation.

• Review and refinement of controls logic, setpoints, schedules, and sequencing to ensure equipment runs only when required and maintains stable environmental conditions.

• Secure remote access configuration using managed connectivity, restricted administrative access, MFA where available, documented access control, and appropriately configured firewalls in line with core NCSC guidance.

• Ongoing monitoring, alarm handling, and reporting to improve fault response, track asset health, and support lifecycle planning.

Results

✓ Asset Protection: Regular PPM helps preserve the performance and lifespan of critical plant serving historic and sensitive buildings.

✓ Operational Reliability: Routine inspections and controls support reduce the risk of avoidable faults and unplanned downtime across estate systems.

✓ Conservation-Focused Operation: Stable, properly controlled heating supports the protection of building fabric and fragile collections.

✓ Secure Digital Oversight: Remote monitoring improves visibility and response times while aligning with established cyber security principles for firewalls, secure configuration, user access control, and update management.

✓ Better Cost Planning: Structured maintenance programmes and clearer asset data support budget forecasting, remedial planning, and longer-term estate management.

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