Hotel Diar El Medina, Energy & systems audit

The challenge

A building that works but cannot be read

Hotel Diar El Medina is not a simple building to run. It heats and cools dozens of rooms and shared spaces, controls guest and staff access across several zones, and, unusually for a hotel its size, generates its own electricity from an on-site turbine. Each of those functions arrived with its own controller, its own software, and its own vendor. None of them share a common language.

The result is a building that works but cannot be read. Engineering staff move between separate screens to answer simple questions. There is no single place to see how much energy the hotel produces, how much it consumes, and what is left over. Reporting is manual, slow, and hard to trust.

Two problems made the audit urgent:

Vendor lock-in. The systems are tied to a single supplier. Changing one part means going back to the same vendor on their terms, and the hotel owns very little of the data those systems produce.
Unrealized energy value. The turbine can produce more than the hotel needs at certain hours. Because production and consumption are not visible in one place, operations cannot be tuned to sell that surplus back to the grid with any confidence.

The hotel did not need new hardware. It needed to understand what it already owned, and to own its data outright.

The approach

A Data Auditor engagement, run on-premises

puniq does not rip and replace. We treat the existing fragmented systems as the starting point and unify them into one vendor-neutral data layer the hotel keeps. Four phases, no hardware on anyone's balance sheet.

PHASE 01

Discover

Full inventory of every controller, protocol and data point across HVAC, access and the turbine. We document what speaks BACnet, what speaks Modbus, and what speaks nothing standard at all.

PHASE 02

Unify

We map the fragmented points into one readable, vendor-neutral layer running on-premises. Production and consumption finally sit on the same screen, in the same units, in real time.

PHASE 03

Tune

With energy flows visible, operations can be modeled hour by hour: when to run the turbine, when to draw from the grid, and when surplus is worth selling back.

PHASE 04

Hand over

We close with the Documented Data Map, a complete, plain record of every system and signal in the building, owned by the hotel, not locked behind a vendor.

What the audit unlocks

Leverage, not a dashboard for its own sake

Once every system is readable and the data belongs to the hotel, three things become possible that were not before. The building can be optimized as one machine rather than three. The surplus from the turbine becomes a measurable, sellable asset instead of guesswork. And the hotel can change suppliers, add systems, or layer on AI optimization later, all without starting from zero, because the map already exists.

Delivered in this engagement

The Documented Data Map of every HVAC, access and energy point
One on-premises, vendor-neutral data layer
Unified view of turbine production vs. building consumption
Open-protocol integration plan to break vendor lock-in
A model for tuning operations to sell grid surplus

From locked to readable

Make the building readable first, then make it intelligent

By the close of the discovery and unify phases, the hotel will hold something it never had: a single, honest picture of how the building produces, stores and spends energy. That picture is the foundation for everything that follows.

The immediate win is freedom. With the Documented Data Map in hand, the hotel is no longer dependent on one vendor to understand its own building. The longer-term win is value: a turbine that was treated as a backup becomes a managed asset, with a clear, data-backed case for selling surplus into the grid at the right hours.

This is the pattern puniq repeats across hospitality, commercial and energy assets. The audit is where it starts.

We had three systems and three vendors and still could not answer one question: how much power do we actually have to spare? Putting it all on one screen changed how we think about the building.

Operations Manager
Hotel Diar El Medina, Hammamet

More work