Here's a surprising fact: winter is not when buildings waste the most money on heating. Sounds completely wrong, right?

Winter is the coldest time of year. Heating systems are running full blast. Buildings are burning through fuel like crazy. But our data shows the most money actually gets wasted in the spring.

Why buildings waste the most money in Spring

The first is that the weather swings wildly. It could be 35 degrees at 7AM. So the heating system fires up hard. But by 2PM, it's 62 and sunny. The morning heat didn't just waste money, it's literally still sitting in the building making everybody uncomfortable.

The second is most heating systems have no idea what's happening inside the building. In the dead of winter, typically on-site staff will crank the heat up. And because the old school control has no idea what the temperature is, once the weather becomes mild, it continues to pump out heat as if it were the dead of winter. The building gets way overheated and nobody even complains because they just open their windows.

Spring = huge opportunity to save money on heating

The result is a ton of wasted energy in the spring months. The good news is that the more wasteful your building is in the spring, the more opportunity there is to save money.

This is exactly where smart controls earn their name. They pull in a real time weather feed and look 12 hours ahead every single minute of the day. And, they use wireless temperature sensors across the building to measure what's actually happening inside.

When a cold morning is about to flip into a 60 degree afternoon, smart controls preemptively dial back the heat. The result is more comfortable buildings and dramatically lower fuel bills.

In fact, our own data backs this up.

Smart controls save 32% on heating

Across the 10,000 buildings Runwise is installed in, we've saved buildings an average of 23% on heating costs year round.

But that number jumps to 32% between the months of March and May, during the spring. So don't let the warm weather fool you, spring isn't a break from heating waste. For most buildings, it's the worst of it, and the biggest opportunity to fix it.