Device installation time
Compliance failures notified immediately
Compliance with British Emergency Lighting Standard
Established in Widnes in 2005, Halton Housing is a not-for-profit Housing Association that own and manage over 7000 homes. As a forward thinking housing association that puts their customers at the centre of everything they do, Halton Housing have led the charge in technology adoption throughout all sectors of the company with their “digital first”approach. Underpinned by core values of transparency, honesty and innovation the team at Halton have fully embraced digital transformation to help support and improve the lives of their residents.
Halton Housing wanted to focus on moving away from manual testing of emergency lighting in their residential housing blocks. Spread out over a wide geographic area, testing of emergency lighting in each block required in-person visits to all lights, at all locations, on a monthly basis. Because of the large amount of resources needed to execute testing and maintenance, work was outsourced to a third party contractor who carried out testing, inspection and repairs on their behalf. PDF certificates of completion were then sent to Halton Housing’s compliance team.
After some discussion about the emergency lighting already installed in their buildings and the methods used to test and maintain them, Lee Reevell, Head of Innovation & Architecture and Gav Roberts, Innovation Officer felt there was an opportunity to make things more efficient. Up to that point, connecting together information to streamline their emergency lighting process was impossible because manual testing gave no indication of failures in advance. Technicians had to attend the site to complete routine testing and determine if there were any problems. If there was an issue with any light the next step was to order the part for replacement and at a later date return to site to complete the repair.
Lee explains, “Our emergency lights which didn’t use LED bulbs failed frequently leading to countless hours wasted going back and forth replacing bulbs. Another shortcoming we identified in the process was that PDF testing reports generated by our third party contractor existed in a silo and didn’t feed into any of our in-house asset management systems.”
Halton Housing’s journey with Safecility began with a demonstration of Safecility’s Emergency Lighting Controller, leading to an on site pilot of five devices.
Lee describes Halton Housing’s plans for IoT “we’ve big goals when it comes to using IoT to help us pre-empt maintenance in our housing stock. We’ve tried a number of different sensors to help us monitor different environmental conditions and also automate compliance testing and improve safety. Many of these sensors work well but can be techy and difficult to set up. Safecility couldn’t be more different – we simply plugged the sensors in and instantly had an automated emergency lighting testing system without any complex set up or extra wiring.”
“Safecility’s sensor sends information directly to a software platform where bulb or battery failures are flagged without having to attend the emergency light in person. This saves double or triple visits to repair lights and stops any failures slipping through the cracks. It allows us to be completely confident in the knowledge that nothing has been missed. That we’re fully compliant and our residents are as safe as can be.”
– Lee Reevell, Head of Innovation & Architecture, Halton Housing.
Safecility can be installed in just one building, or a thousand. It is infinitely scalable and requires no extra wiring or installation of gateways. Other compliance sensor solutions like Legionella monitoring are also available. Results can be streamed directly to the Safecility platform, or via an API to other building management systems.
To find out how Safecility can make your building compliance simple and stress free contact us today for a free demo.
