Growing year-round comfort at Your Local Garden Centre
Your Local Garden Centre cuts heating bills and creates a welcoming environment for visitors with the Mini Optima air curtain.
The ‘Your Local Garden Centre’ is a family-run garden centre group offering an extensive range of high-quality plants, horticultural products and seasonal essentials, with a strong focus on customer service. At its Alver Valley centre in Lee-on-Solent, creating a welcoming and comfortable environment is a vital part of the customer experience.
With a mix of indoor retail areas and outdoor plant displays, customers and staff move frequently between varying environments throughout the day. This constant flow between inside and outside can make maintaining comfortable indoor temperatures more challenging, particularly during colder weather. Heated air quickly escapes while cold outside air enters, increasing demand on the heating system and making conditions around entrances and interconnecting doorways less comfortable.
To help address this, four electrically heated Mini Optima air curtains from JS Air Curtains were installed above the main entrance doors and on the interconnecting doorways throughout the centre.
The air curtains create a powerful barrier of air across each opening, helping to reduce the exchange of indoor and outdoor air when doors are open. During the winter months, this helps retain warmth inside, maintain more stable temperatures and reduce unnecessary energy loss.
Dan Musgrove, Assistant Manager at Your Local Garden Centre, Alver Valley, commented:
“We love the air curtains. They’re really easy to use and the heating is great during the winter months, helping us keep the garden centre warm when it’s really cold outside, while also saving energy. Our customers and team really appreciate them. They’ve also been brilliant during the recent hot weather, as they will automatically run on ‘air only’ to keep the hot air out and offer welcome respite from the heat.”
The Mini Optima combines a slim profile and curved end panels with powerful performance, making it an unobtrusive addition to commercial entrances. Its micro-perforated inlet grille filters incoming air without the need for routinely replaced internal filters, helping to simplify ongoing maintenance.
Alongside improving comfort, the air curtains can make a significant contribution to energy efficiency. Research highlights that high-traffic retail environments can benefit from HVAC energy reductions exceeding 30% when air curtains are correctly applied, helping to reduce the demand placed on heating and cooling systems.
Each unit is supplied with the Advanced PRO controller, featuring built-in sensors that intelligently monitor and control temperatures. For electrically heated models, the wall-mounted LCD controller provides two fan speeds and three heating stages, with an infrared remote control also supplied as standard.
The flexibility to automatically operate the units with, or without heating means their benefits extend beyond the colder months. In winter, they help maintain a warm and welcoming interior, while air-only operation can provide a welcome barrier to the warmer weather.
The result for Your Local Garden Centre is a welcoming and comfortable energy-efficient environment for customers and staff, whatever the season.
