Heating Efficiency
German Commercial Vegetable Producer cut gas consumption 5% while holding tighter temperature control.
Sera’s continuous reasoning over boiler behavior, pipe dynamics, climate demand, and site protocols turned reactive heating into precise, waste-minimizing control—delivering consistent crop environments with less energy input and no hardware upgrades.
Customer
Commercial Vegetable Producer
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The challenge before Sera
Heating is often the dominant energy cost in heated greenhouses, but inefficiencies compound quickly:
Poorly tuned boiler settings and schedules caused excessive gas use from over-firing or short-cycling.
Inaccurate heat-up/cool-down timing led to over-heating (wasted energy, RH spikes) or under-heating (transpiration stalls, yield drag).
Maintaining stable target temperatures across zones was inconsistent—teams reacted to deviations after they occurred, without clear cause-effect visibility into pipe delta-T, circulation delays, load-shed rules, or external influences.
No real-time, integrated reasoning meant adjustments stayed manual and conservative—leaving preventable waste on the table while risking crop stress during ramps or cold snaps.
How Sera helps
Sera deployed as the intelligence layer above the existing climate computer and energy data, ingesting boiler logs, pipe temperatures, climate commands, weather, and the grower’s heating protocols/SOPs. It continuously reasoned over thermal dynamics, hardware response, and crop needs to:
Predict and explain heat-up/cool-down accurately: "Boiler needs 28 min to reach +2 °C pipe delta from current load—current ramp schedule undershoots by 12 min."
Recommend protocol-aligned optimizations: Adjust min runtime, load-shed thresholds, circulation timing, or vent minimums to eliminate short-cycling and align with demand windows.
Deliver root-cause insights via assistant: Ask "Why pipe temp lagging during sunrise?" → "Lag from boiler short-cycling (cycle avg 4.8 min vs. target 10 min) + circulation delay; minor RH +4% impact. Suggestion: Raise min runtime 2 min per your winter protocol."
Automate smart control loops: Shift from fixed schedules to demand-aware orchestration—activate/shut down boilers precisely, suppress unnecessary runs, and route high-priority alerts only when crop-relevant.
Enforce consistency: Knowledge Base captured their best heating rules and site quirks so every recommendation stayed tailored, repeatable, and safe—no generic overrides.
No new sensors or major hardware changes—just smarter interpretation of existing data to close efficiency gaps.
The results
The Results
5% improvement in gas consumption efficiency—direct reduction in energy costs through minimized short-cycling, precise ramp timing, and eliminated wasteful over-firing.
Optimized climate control—more consistent target temperatures across zones, supporting healthier transpiration, better fruit set, and reduced stress-related defects.
Reduced waste—Boiler operation aligned tightly with actual need, conserving gas without compromising environmental stability or yield.
Overall: Significant OpEx savings and more predictable crop performance through proactive, reasoned heating management.
Why it matters
Heating efficiency isn’t about turning boilers off—it’s about running them exactly when and how the crop demands, using real cause-effect reasoning instead of thresholds or timers. Sera turns energy from a blunt cost into a tunable lever: lower consumption per kg produced, tighter environmental control, and resilience to price volatility—all while leaving dashboards behind for natural-language insights and automated actions. This case shows how Sera’s intelligence layer delivers measurable savings and crop benefits in heated operations at scale.
