Our door is always open to customers who want to come in and see all the amazing technology that Currys has to offer, but word on the street is that the average high street automatic door spends 64% of trading time opening or closing*.
It’s a life of perpetual motion, none more so than for our stores on Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road in central London, with tens-of-thousands of shoppers passing by our stores each day.
Whilst we’d love everyone who walks past to be greeted with an open door and come in and have a look at the latest air-fryer or washing machines, sadly sometimes our doors slide open, and no one walks through – how sad!
As you might imagine, this continual opening-and-closing doesn't sit right with us, due to the environmental and financial cost of powering such endless movement. So, how do we prevent this from happening all day long? We are a tech company, and love using innovative tech to solve our problems. And so, we teamed up with our partners at FAAC Entrance Solutions, to devise an energy efficient, temperature controlling and cost competitive solution which works better for the planet, our customers and for us! We’re already seeing great improvements in energy efficiency as a result in two of our London stores.
Impressively, we didn’t even have to replace the doors to harness these savings, FAAC Entrance Solutions recommended their bespoke tech, which installs a new feature onto the existing fittings. It works through the power of intelligent opening technology and advanced sensors – it can tell if a passer-by is either walking directly towards a store, or past one (hopefully to return later). The special add-on can also stop the door movement mid-opening cycle and reverse it, minimising the amount of time the doorway is open, especially valuable on a cold winter’s day in London.
Both our Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road stores now have their doors open for the right reason – to let our amazing customers in. It’s also allowing our teams to keep much better tabs on temperature – not only saving energy, but also keeping our stores cooler in the summer and warm during the winter months.
The energy savings have exceeded our expectations: our Oxford Street store has seen an impressive 15% energy saving output during a five-month period, allowing us to retain 12,565 kWh in the process.
It’s small changes like this which can amount to huge savings across the business – and make an important contribution to our mission to becoming Net Zero by 2040.
*FAAC Entrance Solutions
