Direct answers, with the conditions attached. Where we can't evidence something, we say so rather than guess.
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What this page is. The questions we actually get asked on first calls, answered directly, with the conditions attached. Where we can’t evidence something, we say so rather than guess. Every answer below is written to be quoted straight into a tender return or forwarded to a colleague.
Who it’s for. The project manager who carries the project P&L and has ended up owning the welfare compound, and the bid or estimating team answering an energy-monitoring clause against a deadline.
The answers in brief. Gaia supplies a control unit, not cabins, and you keep your existing cabin supplier. DataMate monitors and reports, free. AutoMate adds control and is £25 per cabin or bay per week. A qualified electrician does the install, never your site team, and every cabin leaves with its own commissioning certificate. Savings are measured against your own site’s benchmark, at circuit level, in kWh, week against week, before you pay anything. The guarantee is published with its condition attached.
What to do next. If you would rather see this on a live project than read about it, the one button below puts DataMate on one of your sites, free. If you would rather read first, the index further down lists every question on this page, and the full answers follow beneath it in the same order.
If you’d rather see this on a live site than read about it:
Recommended first step
We monitor your cabins until consumption settles, and you get the wastage review.
Your cost: coordination, and one engineer at the board.
Get DataMate freeAnswer a few questions about your welfare setup, and see whether it looks higher-risk than comparable monitored sites.
Your cost: 20 seconds and an email address for the result.
Check how your site comparesFor teams ready to standardise cabins across projects.
Your cost: a 30-minute call.
Book an AutoMate callNo. We supply a box, not accommodation.
You keep your existing cabin supplier, always. Our preferred route is to ship our units to that supplier so they fit them during cabin setup, which means cabins arrive on site already fitted. That's what we call a Gaia Enabled cabin: their cabin, our box in it.
It's better for you that way. Nothing to arrange on site, and no install to fit around your programme.
On many contract forms the contractor doesn't pay the welfare electricity bill; the client does. Where that's true, a project P&L argument collapses on that project, because the saving lands on somebody else's account.
So we ask it on the first call rather than discover it three months in. It's a qualification question, not a detail.
Where the client pays, the conversation moves to carbon reporting and standardisation, usually a client-side or bid-team discussion rather than a site one. Still worth having. Just a different conversation, with different people in the room.
More high-load circuits, running at the same time.
A drying room board typically carries heaters, dehumidifiers, fans and sockets, with heat and dehumidification working together, one driving moisture out of the clothing and the other removing it from the air. A standard office or canteen carries one climate appliance, a water boiler, sockets and lights.
Then add that nobody switches a drying room off on a Friday. It becomes the most expensive room in the compound, and it's the one nobody is looking at.
The wiring scheme for both cabin types sets out which circuits sit where. Why a timer alone can’t fix a drying room, and what changes when it isn’t the only thing deciding.
We build one from your own site, and every saving is valued at what the equipment actually draws. Two things run together.
The proof is your own site; the rate comes from everybody's. The two weeks that prove the control works are your cabins and your meter, nothing pooled. What an hour of switching-off is worth is measured against the largest record of welfare-cabin energy behaviour in UK construction, and it grows every week, every site we monitor, matched on those five conditions. An average built from one site is a small number of hours and a shaky figure; built from all of them it is the most reliable estimate of what that equipment really draws that anyone in this industry has. And we can tell you how many measured hours sit behind any figure we give you, including when a particular combination is thin.
Two things we don't do. We don't treat the benchmark as a fixed snapshot taken before the automation goes on; the band averages behind every credited saving are refreshed daily as every site we monitor adds to the record. And we don't verify savings against your energy bills; welfare cabins rarely sit on separate metering, so there is usually no bill isolated to the cabins. Savings are measured against your site's own benchmark, at circuit level, in kWh.
The heater circuit runs through one of the four contactors in the AutoMate unit, so it can be switched at the distribution board rather than relying on somebody remembering.
Door and occupancy sensors establish whether anyone is actually in the room, and timers cover the known pattern, so the heating follows whether the room is being used, not somebody remembering.
The same detection covers this weekend example and a door propped open at midday alike. You don't set any of it up yourself. You ask us, and we handle it.
No, because we do it, or your cabin supplier does. Never your site team. Installation is included at every stage and never charged.
This is real electrical work. The circuit cable is disconnected from its MCB, extended into our unit, and a new cable from the contactor terminates back in the MCB. It is carried out by a qualified electrician and tested to BS 7671, with a New Installation Certificate handed over on completion.
On your first sites that electrician is ours. At scale it's your cabin supplier's, fitting units during cabin setup.
To be plain about it: this is not a plug-in device, and it is not a job for a site team. The answer is no because somebody qualified does it for you, not because it's trivial.
Every cabin leaves with its own commissioning certificate. Not one per site, one per cabin. It records the cabin ID, the installer, the date, the circuit mappings, the load-test results, which circuits were deliberately excluded and why, and an explicit “safe to operate” status.
That is the document to give your H&S or site-access team, alongside the BS 7671 New Installation Certificate for the electrical work itself.
Whatever a site asks for, the commissioning process will not put any of these on a contactor: 32A loads, three-phase circuits, industrial loads, life-safety circuits, incorrect cable groupings, or any circuit that cannot be positively identified.
They are all still measured; a CT goes on every one. Refusing to control a circuit is not the same as ignoring it.
Before a cabin goes live each controllable circuit is switched and measured, and the reading is checked against what the appliance label claims. A mismatch gets diagnosed rather than accepted: wrong pole, wrong CT, a CT fitted backwards, miswired, or an appliance that is not what the label says. Sockets are always questioned, because a ring main tells you nothing about what is plugged into it.
This is the honest reason a Gaia install so often turns up faulty or mis-labelled kit nobody knew about: we test the board rather than trusting its labelling.
The first anomaly gets a warning and an explanation. The second stops the install. It does not proceed on a best guess; the reason is logged and the job escalates to a Gaia engineer as a person.
The same applies if a cabin has more controllable loads than contactors: lights come out first, then sockets, never the water boiler or the dehumidifiers, and if that is still not enough it escalates rather than resolving itself.
No. DataMate and AutoMate are the same box.
DataMate is that box in monitoring mode. Moving to AutoMate means switching control on. No second installation, and no new hardware.
You don't need your cabin supplier involved to start; we install free on your first sites.
When you roll out at scale we work with your supplier directly, and we already ship boxes to a major plant hire firm who fit them at manufacture.
Lead time to a supplier is 10 working days from receipt of purchase order.
Us.
Where a supplier fits the units they carry out the electrical installation and testing, and Gaia attends site to commission the system, setting each unit up on the platform and checking the installation and circuit labelling are correct. The system is ours and so is the support.
It also changes something for your supplier. They can't fix a faulty heater they can't see. Now they can. Faulty heaters and water heaters, wiring issues, mis-labelled circuits and missing door closers all show up in the data, which makes it a quality conversation rather than an argument.
Yes, because we don’t use their labels.
Every supplier labels a distribution board differently. One board says “Immersion”, the next says “Water Htr”. One says “Ring main”, another says “Radial”. Left alone, that is four suppliers’ worth of naming conventions and no way to add them together.
At install, every circuit is normalised to a standard set of load types. “Immersion” and “Water Htr” both become Water boiler. Whatever the board in front of the installer says, what lands in the data is the same short list of load types on every cabin, from every supplier.
That is why two cabins from different suppliers, with different labelling conventions on their boards, appear in the same report on the same terms, and why the numbers add up rather than sitting in four separate piles.
Once the load types are consistent, the reporting rolls up: organisation → project → site → building → room → load. You can ask what every drying room across a whole programme cost you last month, and get an answer, not four answers in four formats that somebody has to reconcile by hand.
This is usually the real question behind “will it work with my other sites?” One standard across the programme, without anyone having to police it. The normalisation happens at install, every time, whoever supplied the cabin.
It depends how the box got there.
| Factory-fitted a Gaia Enabled cabin |
It arrived in the cabin and it leaves in the cabin. Nothing to remove, nothing to coordinate. |
|---|---|
| Retrofitted by us typical for a first free DataMate site |
We come and remove the unit before the cabin goes back to the hire company. |
Go Gaia Enabled from day one and decommissioning becomes a non-event. That's the main practical argument for getting your cabin supplier involved early.
Yes. We measure and control kWh at circuit level regardless of how the electricity is generated, so the energy saving is the same.
On a generator site the saving is realised as diesel rather than kWh. At Morgan Sindall's Maendy Primary School, generator until 10 September 2024, grid afterwards, 3,792 litres of diesel were avoided across the generator period.
Generator periods save more than grid periods, because generation is less efficient. Maendy read 71% across its generator sub-period, 7 May 2024 to 10 September 2024, and 54% across its grid sub-period, 10 September 2024 to 31 October 2025, against 57% for the whole period, 7 May 2024 to 31 October 2025. We publish the whole-period figure and show sub-periods underneath it; a generator result doesn't transfer to a grid site.
Yes, and it is usually worth more than the energy saving.
A site specifies its generator or its grid connection for the worst quarter-hour it will ever see, not for what it uses on an average afternoon. Cut the peak and you can specify smaller, for the whole job.
On a generator site that is the entire cost base. At Maendy a 60 kVA generator was replaced with a Gaia-enabled 10 kVA solar hybrid delivering the same 590 kWh, with fuel cost per kWh falling from £1.12 to £0.32 at £1.50 a litre, over the month recorded, 9 May to 8 June 2024.
Being precise about what did that: peak shaving is what made the smaller plant viable; the battery and the solar are what carried it. Load shedding on its own does not take a site from 60 kVA to 10 kVA, and we would not claim it does.
On a grid site it is the connection. A temporary construction supply is priced on capacity, not consumption. If the peak demands a bigger connection than the site has, that is a five- or six-figure conversation with the network operator and a lead time measured in months. Not having to have it is the saving.
Watch peak shaving happen, or see the Maendy case study.
Take what you need from this site. It's built to be quoted.
If something's missing and you're on a deadline, ask. We'd rather get it to you than have you write around a gap.
DataMate monitoring is free, with installation included. Monitor-only, no control, no commitment.
AutoMate, which adds control, is £25 per cabin or bay per week. Discounts are available for upfront terms, ask.
On projects of six months or more it carries a guarantee: at least a 50% saving on the energy waste in the areas we control, and if our fees come to more than we've saved you across the project, we credit the difference. So you cannot end a project out of pocket.
No, not directly. Your site tells us what it needs, in plain English, and Gaia makes the change. Nobody on site adjusts a rule at the board.
That boundary is deliberate. Two parties both able to touch the same heater is how kit ends up switched off at the mains by somebody trying to help. When you flag something, we make the change, and whatever it does next is on us, which is also what makes the savings guarantee possible: we cannot guarantee a number if someone else can alter the rules behind it.
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