Heating, ventilation and air conditioning are among the largest energy consumers in most buildings, and a good part of that energy goes into spaces that are empty or barely used. Many HVAC systems still run on fixed schedules that were set years ago and never checked against how the building is really used. Visitor counts from WELLPOINT People Counters add the missing piece: how many people come in, at what hours and on which days.
Why Align HVAC with Foot Traffic?
A fixed schedule assumes that the building is equally busy every day. In practice, a store may be quiet until late morning, an office may be half empty on Fridays, and a public building may have long stretches with few visitors. Once you know these patterns, you can shorten heating and cooling hours where they are not needed and keep full comfort when people are there. The idea is simple: energy use should follow the way the building is used, not old habits.
How It Works
Counting at the entrances
The WELLPOINT People Counter (Pulse V3) is mounted beside each entrance and counts entries and exits separately with a camera-free time-of-flight sensor. WELLPOINT.cloud calculates occupancy as entries minus exits.Measuring one part of a building
The counter only sees the doorway it is mounted on. If you want separate figures for a floor or a wing, place counters at every entrance of that area; its figures then come from those doorways.Reviewing the reports
The dashboard shows visitors by hour and day, trends month by month and current occupancy. The figures are real-time, with data updates every 5 minutes on PLUS and PRO (hourly on LITE). Your facility team compares them with the current HVAC schedule and finds the hours where heating or cooling runs for almost nobody.Adjusting the schedule
The changes are made by your team in the HVAC or building management system; WELLPOINT does not control HVAC equipment. If you want to go further, on PRO, the API can be used to integrate WELLPOINT visitor counts with POS, BI or other business systems, so a building systems integrator can work with the counts. If you already measure CO2 for ventilation, the visitor counts give you a second view of the same hours.
Benefits for Your Business
- Heating and cooling hours based on measured use instead of assumptions
- A clear view of busy and quiet hours, days and months
- Comparable figures for several sites in one account
- Camera-free, anonymous counts only: the Pulse V3 does not capture images or identify visitors
- CSV export on PLUS and PRO for your own energy reports, API on PRO
What This Can Look Like in Practice
Consider a hypothetical retail store that heats its sales floor fully from opening time. If the hourly reports show that very few visitors arrive in the first hour on weekdays, the facility manager could test a later start for full heating on those days and watch comfort and energy bills over the following weeks. An office manager could do the same with the monthly trends: if Friday occupancy stays low month after month, ventilation and cooling for that day are worth a review.
How much you save depends on your building, your HVAC system and how far you adjust the schedules, so measure energy use before and after each change rather than relying on general figures.
The WELLPOINT People Counter runs on a 5 V USB power adapter and sends its counts over built-in mobile data, so there is no network or data cable to lay and nothing to set up on your network. You can order the device and choose a plan (LITE, PLUS or PRO) on visitorcount.com.
Want to see the reports first? Request a demo account – it runs on fictitious sample data. More about the platform at wellpoint.cloud.