Member Article

Selwood Housing to Reduce Flushing Requirement by 75% using Remote Technology

Selwood Housing, a social housing provider managing almost 7000 homes for rent and shared ownership, based in the South West, has successfully completed a thorough evaluation of GUARDIAN® remote technology. This low cost pilot enabled Selwood Housing to demonstrate a compelling business case; saving the organisation time, money, energy and water.

Throughout the 12 week evaluation, the GUARDIAN remote monitoring system, designed and manufactured in the UK by Plexus Innovation, provided Selwood Housing, remotely and in real time, with temperature measurements required for legionella compliance management and accurately identified outlets requiring weekly flushing.

Selwood Housing turned to remote technology in response to a range of business challenges:

• Traditional use of monthly manual temperature checks is cumbersome and administration heavy, using valuable manpower which could be used elsewhere, such as fire safety. • Manual methods also increase the Carbon footprint of the organisation, with vans required to visit every property, weekly. • Water and energy waste is increased by flushing every outlet, required because historically, there is no way of detecting usage profile of an asset. • Better understanding of TMV condition required to enable proactive reduction of scald risk due to a failing asset.

Managing director and co-founder of Plexus Innovation, Ian Murray said:

“Plexus Innovation worked with Selwood Housing on this pilot to demonstrate the positive impact of GUARDIAN®. Having selected one of its main office facilities, the hardware required was installed quickly and easily.

“Based on just this single site, the results have been impactful. Selwood Housing has seen a 75% reduction in flushing requirement and confirmed that failing TMVs can be accurately identified, to enable preventative maintenance to be carried out. Extrapolating these results across their 21 high priority facilities, annual benefits to Selwood Housing include saving 55 days in manpower, reducing associated CO2 by 11 Tones, and eliminating 475,000 litres of water. I guess that it’s no surprise that Selwood Housing has decided to commercially implement across those 21 facilities immediately!”

Selwood Housing will implement GUARDIAN technology across 21 further sites 222 assets during the first half of 2022. Dominic Walmsley, senior property surveyor at Selwood Housing, said:

“The digital reporting is loved by the team already, as it is so much more convenient than the manual process we used to have to adopt before.

“We went into the pilot to automate our water flushing and legionella compliance as much as possible, we get weekly reports which we find really useful and removes the need to process an admin heavy data report.

“We are now only flushing those assets that are required, reducing time that technicians open outlets. The data gives us a better understanding of our TMV performance and whether there is a scalding risk – we had a few highlighted to us, for which we’ve been able to take relevant action.

“It now has the full support of our entire team and executive board, and we look forward to rolling it out across the rest of our properties in the next two years.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Anna Toms .