The hospitality industry is entering a new era of energy optimization powered by cloud-powered smart thermostats. While traditional energy management solutions (EMS) have helped hotels reduce waste without sacrificing guest comfort, the latest have evolved to unlock deeper energy savings through integration with property management systems (PMS) and real-time check-in and check-out signals.
Traditionally, smart thermostats rely on “If This, Then That” (IFTTT) logic, with every routine, rule, and response embedded directly in the device. Despite the wide range of variables required in a typical hotel thermostat, EMS pioneers have produced excellent results, compressing dozens of scenarios into compact hardware.
However, today’s demand goes beyond static rules. Advanced and predictive features require thousands more lines of code inside the thermostat, increasing costs and delaying the introduction of new solutions.
The next evolution of smart climate control isn’t about making devices work harder; it’s about making them smarter through the cloud. By shifting intelligence to cloud-based platforms, cloud-powered smart thermostats can tap into AI and predictive analytics, enabling faster innovation, richer insights, and energy savings that simply aren’t possible at the device level alone.
Cloud Computing Unlocks New Possibilities
The rapid proliferation of cloud-connected solutions across nearly every other operating system is driving a shift in EMS design. Instead of a smart thermostat that’s limited by its onboard hardware, a cloud-connected thermostat leverages new development techniques, flexible design, and virtually unlimited computational power. Thermostats are becoming more connected and controllable, rather than more inherently powerful.
Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and modern cloud computing enable massive expansion in features, capabilities and data, which hoteliers can leverage to further optimize operations, energy savings and guest experiences. A cloud-native foundation provides a future-ready approach with a thermostat that’s responsive to cloud controls and logic rather than packed full of every possible scenario.
Shifting Advanced Intelligence to the Cloud and AI
Cloud-native EMS systems flip the traditional model. Instead of investing in expensive thermostats in every room, properties can deploy simpler, less expensive devices that serve as endpoints while the heavy lifting happens in the cloud.
Consider a hotel in the San Francisco Bay area served by PG&E as its utility provider. A traditional smart thermostat would be fixed to a check-in setpoint, an unoccupied setback, and an unrented, check-out deadband. Over the course of the year, the region moves from summer to winter, and with a networked system, staff can push changes to the individual thermostats.
These logic routines have certainly produced savings for hotels and become “best practices” for EMS in hospitality. But that scenario changes drastically with dynamic energy pricing.
For example, PG&E implements Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing for commercial electricity, which means the price changes based on the time and season. Energy is most expensive during peak periods (4-9 p.m.), slightly less costly during “part peak” periods (2-4 and 9-11 p.m. in the summer), even cheaper during off-peak (all other times) and at its lowest cost during “super off peak” (9 a.m.-2 p.m. during Winter and March through May).
For a 110-room select service property with 90% occupancy going into a weekend in July, the typical smart thermostat scenario might be to pre-cool the rooms in anticipation of typical check-out/check-in times and apply that logic universally across every room.
But with a cloud-powered smart thermostat, you have infinite options: pre-cool the guest rooms when power costs are lowest? Or wait for check-in by the PMS? The optimal answer will vary for every room, every hour, every day, and based on the current rates from PG&E. The cloud-native EMS can perform that complex analysis in real time, to decide what’s best for optimal cost savings and guest comfort.
This kind of processing is impossible with in-room only hardware and, until recently, only available in extremely expensive building control systems for airports, hospitals, or universities. With widespread access to cloud processing, ML and AI, a new breed of EMS is now making this capability affordable for hospitality.
This fundamentally changes how hotels invest in EMS solutions. Rather than buying devices with a fixed set of features and capabilities, properties can install systems purpose-built to become more powerful over time through cloud software development.
Overcoming Connectivity Challenges
One of the most common questions about a networked system is, What happens when the network goes down? Hoteliers worry the thermostat will stop working if it loses network connectivity. The answer is “no.”
Consider these two factors:
- Default settings provide a failsafe. While connected to the cloud, the EMS can operate independently, but will continue to keep the guest room comfortable even if offline. If the property’s guest Wi-Fi goes down, the thermostat will default to offline settings and continue to work.
- Wi-Fi uptime is already treated as mission-critical. Today’s hotels depend heavily on network connectivity for property management systems, entry access, point of sale, guest internet, streaming TV, and countless other critical operations. Your IT team already manages uptime as mission-critical infrastructure.
Cloud-native EMS and cloud-powered smart thermostats use the guest Wi-Fi as the network infrastructure–a paradigm shift from the past in which separate mesh networks were installed specifically for the thermostats. These systems were typically outside the purview of the IT department or the guest Wi-Fi managed provider, and responsibility often fell to facilities maintenance to manage them. If the network went down, it might go unnoticed by guests or even staff, rendering the “smart” features less effective until connectivity was restored. But by leve raging the same professionally managed, critical Wi-Fi infrastructure that the entire hotel runs on, the EMS becomes much more effective and reliable.
Designing for the future with cloud-powered smart thermostats
Most smart thermostat systems can pull data from in-room devices and generate reports showing what happened. But true cloud-native systems are bidirectional, predictive, and dynamic. They don’t just tell you what happened—they actively optimize operations in real time and continuously improve as algorithms get smarter.
The future of energy management lies in machine learning, AI, and predictive analytics, and it’s imperative to invest in technology that allows you to leverage these possibilities. That means you don’t need a smarter thermostat. You need smarter infrastructure that puts intelligence where it belongs: in the cloud. Ready to take the leap with cloud-powered smart thermostats? Nomadix is here to help.
Jeff Johns is Global VP of EMS Business Development for Nomaidx, an ASSA ABLOY company. Responsible for driving global channel partner sales of Nomadix EMS and GRMS solutions for hospitality, casino, multi-tenant dwelling units, and other available markets, Johns works closely with Wi-Fi and IP enabled partners to specify product requirements and configurations for a select channel of strategic partners.
This article originally appeared on Hospitality Net.