VIVID Housing

Safecility help Hampshire's largest housing provider streamline Emergency Lighting compliance

90%

Reduction in site visits to Emergency Lighting

10 mins

Device installation time

B.S. 5266

Compliance with British Emergency Lighting Standards

VIVID Housing

Based in Hampshire, VIVID is one of the UKs leading affordable and social housing providers. With over 30,000 properties, and 17,000 more planned to meet local needs across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire and West Sussex over the next 10 years,VIVID is committed to giving as many people as possible the greatest chance of having a place to call home. 

VIVID’s mission is to give its clients a safe and secure place to live and it’s achieving this not only by investing in brand new communities, but by investing into existing building stock too. Physical improvements to buildings as well as more efficient regimes for compliance and review are key focus areas for many housing authorities wanting to improve their safety and get on the right track to a carbon neutral future.

Given its ambitious growth plans and commitment to safety and a zero carbon future, VIVID decided to explore IoT as a way to make their compliance efforts more streamlined and carbon efficient.

A Smoother Journey to Compliance

As a landlord, responsibility rests with VIVID to ensure up to date fire and water safety testing in its residential units. To make sure that VIVID is compliant and up to date with fire safety and legionella control in their building stock, compliance testing is carried out manually by an in-house asset management team made up of electricians and safety technicians. As you can imagine, for a large Housing Authority, compliance is laborious and costs quickly add up. For VIVID, keeping on top of compliance was costing an eye watering £3.9 million each year. 

In partnership with The Things Connected Initiative, VIVID decided to put out business specific open calls for IoT solutions that could help it meet some of its biggest compliance challenges and reduce ongoing costs.

VIVID logo white background

“We want VIVID customers to benefit from our ability to disrupt traditional housing services models and improve their wellbeing.”

Justin Crittall, Head of Innovation & Repairs, VIVID

The Flexible Solution VIVID Was Looking For

Before being introduced to Safecility, VIVID was manually inspecting and testing all of its emergency lighting and had never tried an automated solution before. With multiple sites under its remit, wired automated Emergency Lighting had never made sense. Each and every building would need to be rewired causing major disruption and huge expense. VIVID wanted something that solved its problem at scale without the hassle of a wired system. Safecility’s wireless LoRaWAN Emergency Lighting Controller was the ideal solution. The controllers let VIVID carry out its inspection automatically, and remotely, with installation a breeze compared to other automated solutions. The sensor plugs into any brand of DALI light to replace manual testing and reporting and takes less than 10 minutes to install.

VIVID’s Head of Innovation and Repairs, Justin Crittall, decided to test out Safecility in one of VIVID’s sheltered accommodation blocks. Based in Fernhill, the block housed some of VIVID’s most vulnerable tenants. During the course of the pilot VIVID was able to automate its emergency lighting testing and reduce the frequency of manned inspections by 90%. Not only that, it automatically stored and monitored compliance records and alerted VIVID to failures and defects in real-time, allowing quick and efficient targeting of repairs. Justin explains: “Our Fernhill IoT project marks the most significant initiative so far in VIVID’s technology-driven service innovations strategy. Our Fernhill customers will get an improved customer experience and safety reassurances while VIVID will see greater cost effectiveness. We want VIVID customers to benefit from our ability to disrupt traditional housing services models and improve their wellbeing.”

As a people business, VIVID wants to make a real difference to people’s lives. By investing in IoT technology VIVID is able to bring up the standard of compliance in its buildings in a straightforward and non-interruptive way so that it can continue to improve the wellbeing of its tenants and make them safer and more comfortable in their homes.

90% savings, better compliance and safer tenants

With future plans to evaluate Emergency Lighting test automation in eight more of its residential blocks, Safecility gives VIVID the flexibility to effortlessly roll out and scale up its automation.

Safecility can be installed in just one building, or a thousand buildings. 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.