UK Council Uses Smart Tech to Monitor Social Housing Indoor Air

If you've lived in the UK some time, you may have experienced issues with condensation, dampness and even mould in your house. The English Housing Survey of 2021 to 2022 showed that some 4% of houses in the country have severe damp and mould issues, meaning around 1 million homes are affected. But other surveys have shown that around 24% of homes have these problems, and in some studies, the number goes up. But damp, mould and cold don’t just affect homeowner bank accounts that end up having to replace wallpapers and fix house structures, they lead to health problems, and the NHS is estimated to spend approximately £1.4 billion annually in treating patients affected by illnesses associated with living in damp or cold houses. In the face of the situation, the Scottish council area of Stirling turned to a smart solution to monitor humidity, temperature, and CO2 thanks to sensors in their council houses, which are the British social housing. It was recognized that there's always an element of dissatisfaction with services about repairs issues, which will take a long time to resolve and aren't always reported to us in good time. So it was trying to look for ways to sort a problem out with disrepair in a property before it became a serious issue of disrepair. To fit sensors so that we knew there was a problem before we were being contacted. Stirling council embarked on the adventure of monitoring humidity, temperature and CO2 with sensors and software from company HomeLink, to keep an eye on their 6,000 properties, some of which are over 100 years old. So far, they have 2259 connected devices in a total of 488 properties. They have started with the homes that have had issues in the past, to see if the problems persist or if the measures they’ve taken are working. The project is backed by the CivTech programme, which encourages the use of technology to improve public sector issues through an incubator. That’s how the council met HomeLink. There is the gateway, which is the EI1000G. So that's the kind of hub that collects all the data and then sends it back to the cloud. So the whole idea was that we're monitoring not only the safety critical devices in the property and the kind of level of sort of fire risk in the property. But we're also looking at the indoor environment and the kind of health of the building. Some people might live in very difficult circumstances and not tell us about them. So it's also a way of us being proactive to see that there might be a problem in the house somebody is not going to tell us about. They might not want to talk about problems in the house that they've got with dampness until the dampness is so widespread that it's suddenly a very expensive thing for us to repair. Whereas if we had the sensors and we knew there was quite high humidity in a property we’d arrange to go and have a visit. And look at the problem before it’s very widespread because a property can become quite unlivable in quite a short space of time. They typically install three sensors in each property, putting them in the bathroom, kitchen and living room, areas that have shown to be problematic in the past. Stirling asked that each home have its own gateway and there are two types of sensors the council can choose from. One monitors humidity and temperature, the other has the same but adds CO2, which allows to also monitor the air quality. The sensors, which are battery-powered, collect readings every 15 minutes, and the gateway, which is indoors, sends the data to their cloud and platform every two, two and a half hours via cellular connectivity. They started with LoRaWAN, which worked well in densely populated areas, but later realized that for rural areas, which are more spread out, cellular was more cost-efficient. So the data is collected, goes over the cellular network, and then it comes into our kind of data centre, our cloud infrastructure where it's logged, it’s processed. And what happens is the data goes through a huge variety of different intermediate stages. And then we have our insight system, which will calculate a level of risk every night. And it constantly updates taking in the new data that it received. Our insight system will look at the temperature, humidity and the outdoor weather data and will take into account things like the property archetype and the construction material. And it will essentially do very detailed analysis and use machine learning to extract these trends and try and find patterns. There's a dashboard, so you can use the dashboard in different ways. You can look at sort of regions. You could see, let's look at the sensors in this town. You can, as I say, look at where's our issue with properties with humidity, or properties where there's no response suggesting what the property might have been abandoned. Abandonments happen quite a lot. The data can also be viewed by the tenants through an app that is made available to them. The project is funded from the council’s wider maintenance budget of £100k per year and is over a 10-year installation plan. They haven’t calculated an exact return on investment, but having the sensors will allow them to see the issue before it becomes a very expensive one. They’ll be able to flag something before it gets worse and see if the repairs and updates they’ve done to the homes are actually working or if they need to rethink their process. So it’s the Minority Report of home upkeep. It can also help them prevent the loss of rent income, as many tenants abandon properties if issues aren’t fixed. If we don't have the sensors, we don't know what's going on in the property unless we're there. And obviously we can't have repair members of staff in the property every day to look at a problem. So if we have the sensors there, we can see if there's a problem with humidity in the property. You can see if that is happening as a result of many different issues. The UK is pressuring landlords to provide safe homes. After the death of a 2-year old due to mould in the house his family was renting, the government has been putting out strict guidelines to stop the issue in rented homes and even a strict schedule for social housing providers to fix it. This means, that these types of air quality, humidity and temperature monitoring solutions will have more and more space to grow, especially since councils have many homes they rent out, so they need to keep an eye on them but can’t have people checking them all the time personally. These solutions give them a look into the situation inside the homes. As legislation becomes stricter, more councils will be forced to turn to smart solutions to keep up with the standards set and make sure that the living conditions are up to date, and have the data to corroborate it.