Barcud Housing

Barcud Housing deploy Safecility and reduce costs of testing Emergency Lighting by 91%

91%

Yearly cost saving 

10 mins

Device installation time

B.S. 5266

Compliance with British Emergency Lighting Standard

Barcud Housing

Following two years of planning Mid-Wales Housing Association and Tai Ceredigion merged to form Barcud housing in November 2020. 

Although Barcud is technically a new Housing Association, they have a strong pedigree when it comes to adopting technologies to improve day to day operations. In 2019, mid-Wales Housing were shortlisted for the prestigious CIH Welsh Housing Awards in recognition of their advanced use of sensoring technology to monitor the condition of their properties to discover early if repairs or interventions were needed.

A cost heavy approach that lacked transparency

Before Safecility, Barcud tested all emergency lighting within their 5000 properties manually. As is the case with all manual processes, even with the best of intention human error and lack of transparency can be a challenge. Automation is a no brainer to mitigate non-productive manual tasks and make data reporting simple, however, when it comes to Emergency Lighting most market solutions require rewiring which is not feasible for a housing association like Barcud with thousands of buildings.

Despite being ahead of the curve when it comes to deploying IoT, automated compliance was new territory for Barcud. ICT Technician Dean Marsh explains “we’ve been rolling out LoRaWan gateways and sensors in our housing stock to monitor temperature and humidity for predictive maintenance purposes, so while we’re no strangers to IoT, we didn’t realise there were wireless products out there that could automate Emergency Lighting testing until we found Safecility.”

After being introduced, Barcud decided to assess what they were paying for manual testing to see if Safecility was a good fit. They discovered that by moving to automated testing of their emergency lighting, they would reduce yearly testing costs by 91%. Automation would allow them to be more confident in their compliance and pass on yearly savings to their tenants. It was a win-win situation.

Driving change with LoRaWAN

For someone like Dean who works on the IT side of the business, system flexibility and security were extremely important. “We’ve found that among all the different communication protocols available, LoRaWAN is the most secure and reliable choice for housing associations such as ourselves.” Sensors that use LoRaWAN to communicate consume very little battery and data is encrypted by design. Another benefit is that a single LoRaWAN gateway can have up to 3000 devices connected, so scaling sensors across multiple buildings is easy.

Barcud

“Safecility are able to turn your automation ideas into reality. They listen and literally provide solutions overnight”.

– Dean Marsh, ICT Technician, Barcud Housing.

Armed with automation, as well as LoRaWAN connectivity which aligned with their existing IoT set up, Barcud were sold on Safecility from the start. “When we became aware of Safecility we immediately set about organising a pilot of their Emergency Lighting sensors. Not only were we impressed with the product, but with the Safecility team themselves. They listened to us and our specific problems and came up with solutions almost over night. Working with them has been a real pleasure and we’re looking forward to rolling out their Emergency Lighting sensors in a further two blocks shortly”

Simpler compliance and proactive maintenance at a fraction of the cost of manual compliance testing.

Safecility can deliver significant yearly savings and a 90% reduction in site visits to Emergency Lighting compared to manual testing.

Sensors can be installed in just one building, or a thousand buildings. Safecility is infinitely scalable and works with any DALI emergency light meaning no extra wiring is required. Results can be streamed directly to the Safecility platform, or via an API to other building management systems. To find out how you can make your building compliance simple and stress free contact us today for a free demo.