This house lights it’s fire for the colder months. The downside is more dusting for the housekeeping staff, a bit of localised smoke patina and a theoretical increase in fire risk. The benefits probably outweigh this though as it adds enormously to the atmosphere of the house and provides a bit of warmth for visitors and staff alike.

This suit of armour is one of hundreds of artefacts in a heavily visited site. It needs to remain rust free, even when 200 rain soaked visitors come into the building. The cast iron heating pipes are the only way of achieving this.

Sensors for relative humidity tend to drift a little over time. Accuracy is important though so regular calibration I’d required. The sensors in this museum are calibrated at the same time as writing a report on the environmental conditions.

This historic house uses an environmental monitor system to diagnose problems with relative humidity levels as well as find out how effective remedies are. The house is on the coast and seems to get a lot of moisture in the late summer.

These monitoring systems last for years but do need to keep up with the computers they are installed on. In this case an upgrade to Windows 7 means that a new circuit board is needed for the data logger. It’s more of a computer engineer’s job than a conservator’s but a necessary part of the job.

These tapestries have been woven recently and are of great value. We need to make sure they aren’t going to get faded so monitoring of both visible and ultraviolet light is taking place. This should help inform the development of good housekeeping procedures such as using the window shutters. The light meters are being installed when we have scaffold on site for other works.

This time of year is good for lighting fires, especially for places that want to increase visitor numbers in the shoulder months. Gas fires like this are a good clean and safe choice but they can really increase relative humidity levels.

This historic house in the west of Scotland want to find the most cost effective way of preventing damage to its collection and the most efficient way to heat the building. We are developing a strategy to care for both collection and building that will hopefully be rolled out over the next few years and months

This 16th century building has environmental control provided by Hanwell and data logging provided by Tinytag. The two systems are working in parallel to provide some degree of redundancy to the system and to ensure data doesn’t get lost

This church has a temporary electric conservation heating system installed. It’s designed to look after the building, the historic interior and the Pictish carved stone in the church. The trials show the system is working as designed. It would be great to reinstate the Victorian cast iron heating to make the conservation heating permanent and to move away from carbon intensive electric heading.

This 17th century house has a new environmental monitoring system. The first year of data is now available and is showing where the issues are. Too much heading at times and too

little at others. A few suggestions are being put forward to continue with improvements whilst servicing and calibrating the Hanwell environmental monitoring system.

The environmental monitoring system in this house needs an annual calibration. The opportunity was also taken to stop a bit of staff training and to advise on what the conservation issues are.