It runs 168 hours a week. Most of them, nothing needs drying.
A drying room is not one appliance; it’s heaters, dehumidifiers and fans, usually on separate circuits, usually left on continuously because a timer can’t tell a room full of wet kit from an empty one. Gaia runs it when there’s something to dry, and stops the moment there isn’t.
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Not one appliance, and never switched off
A drying room’s distribution board typically carries heaters, dehumidifiers and fans, usually on separate circuits, working together to drive moisture out of wet kit and then remove it from the air. That is already more load than a standard office or canteen carries.
And it is normally left running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whether or not there is anything in it to dry. 168 hours a week of draw, on a room that, most of those hours, is empty.
Why a timer doesn’t fix it
A drying room is supposed to run overnight. That is the whole difficulty. It exists to have clothes dry and ready for the morning shift, so you cannot simply switch it off out of hours the way you can an office heater.
Try that, and there are only two outcomes: you waste the energy running it anyway just in case, or you send people out in wet kit. A clock cannot tell the difference between a room full of wet PPE and an empty one; it only knows what time it is.
What changes
Gaia runs the room when there is something to dry, and stops once the clothes are dry. On a dry week it barely runs. On a wet week it runs until the work is done, and then stops.
The rule that decides this is proprietary, so this page describes what it does, not how. What matters to you is the outcome: the room runs to the drying, not to the clock.
Independent evidence, not ours
Every drying-room figure below is from a peer-reviewed paper, not a Gaia case study, independent evidence you can check at source. Our own measured results are on the case studies, each with its dates.
Zhour, Lee, Abdellatif, Waseem Ahmad and Blackburn (2024), “Improving the Energy Efficiency of the Modular Buildings Drying Room: A Case Study of Construction Site Cabins,” Applied Sciences 14(21):9714. DOI 10.3390/app14219714. Open access, CC BY. Funded by Innovate UK as a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between Liverpool John Moores University and Laing O’Rourke Ltd, grant 10025882.
| Share of the contractor's carbon emissions | Drying rooms account
for around 10% of Laing O’Rourke’s carbon emissions reported, the contractor's own board-level figure, as cited in the paper; not measured or extrapolated by Gaia or by the study |
|---|---|
| One drying room, Everton stadium site | 151.2 MWh a year, which is
roughly £45,000 a year at 30p/kWh extrapolated, a thermal model calibrated against meter data, not a direct annual measurement. The £ figure is our own arithmetic on the paper’s MWh at the top of the 24 to 30p range this site states elsewhere, rounded hard because a modelled figure does not earn pennies |
| Baseline setup, as found | 3 kW fan heaters on a fixed schedule, roughly 4 to 7 in the morning and 4 to 11 at night on weekdays |
This paper tests equipment combinations on a fixed schedule, it does not test demand-led control, does not mention Gaia, and does not validate anything Gaia does. What it gives us is more useful than a validation: its own future-work section names automated, moisture-led control as the unsolved next step. We run it live.
How we measure our own savings, and why we don’t use a percentage from this paper or any other third party as if it were our own, is on the methodology page.
What we’re not claiming
How wet the week was affects a drying room’s figures more than anything else on the compound. A dry measurement period understates the difference control makes; a wet one overstates it. Across a project, the room draws only when there is something to dry, rather than to a fixed schedule, which is the point, but it also means a short measurement window can read either way depending on the weather that week.
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