Social housing providers are facing many roadblocks – tighter regulations, shorter timeframes, friction with tenants, and increasing pressure to build, build, build. To balance all of these, monitoring solutions have become a must-have to help keep track of housing stock. But something’s missing: energy data.
With four real-time data feeds, you have all the information you’ll need to proactively manage your homes, and stop issues in their tracks:
- Live electricity data
- Live gas data
- Live temperature data
- Live humidity data
All of these are available in one affordable, scalable solution in Chameleon’s Gateway Connect. The additional layer of these real-time energy feeds opens up a wealth of potential data to help with these social housing challenges. Here’s how.
Smart asset management
With the latest regulations, including Awaab’s Law, it’s more important than ever to proactively predict and prevent problems.
By combining energy data from a home’s smart meter and environmental data with analytics, housing providers can:
- Spot unusual heating patterns, or under-heating which could contribute to mould, via energy usage and temperature sensors.
- Identify damp and mould risk from increased humidity before it becomes a health hazard.
- Assess thermal efficiency for homes, by factoring in the amount of energy being used to heat the home and the internal temperature vs locally available weather data.
Manage your regulatory requirements
Accurately monitoring the energy and environmental data of your housing stock is a straightforward solution for compliance needs.
The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) increased consumer standards in 2024, necessitating clear evidence of performance and tenant engagement.
Smart energy solutions, such as our Gateway Connect, can help providers:
- Collect real-time energy and environmental data, ideal for reporting and compliance.
- Monitor energy usage trends to alert for necessary interventions.
- Show regulators that decarbonisation efforts are having measurable and effective results.
Better tenant engagement
The idea of living in a sensor-filled home is the stuff of Big Brother nightmares for many, leading to damaged equipment and friction with tenants. Offer your tenants something of value too – in this case, a good look at how they could save money on their energy bills.
Chameleon’s ivie app takes the same energy data from the Gateway Connect, and packages it in a way that is useful and meaningful to tenants.
- See at a glance how much energy they’re using – and what it’s costing.
- Offer detailed insights into not just how much energy they’re using, but where it’s being used. Energy use can be broken down into 13 different categories, helping them pinpoint where to make changes.
- When they use less energy they earn ivie points, which can be exchanged for raffle tickets to win prizes!
Find the homes most in need of retrofits
Retrofit programmes are both expensive and time-consuming – an endless cycle of surveys and reschedules appointments. Scaling these programmes across hundreds and thousands of homes leads to issues of prioritisation, access, and ultimately the best changes to make by the time needs have been assessed.
Real-time energy and environmental data monitoring gives you a head-start, pulling together the information you need in one fell swoop:
- Identify the homes with high heating usage, or those with poor thermal efficiency.
- Chameleon’s energy algorithms can help determine the correct sizing of low-carbon technologies like batteries and solar panels, based on energy usage times and amounts.
- Track improvements over time with real-time data, before and after intervention.
Four problems. Four feeds. Four solutions. The combination of the Gateway Connect for social housing providers and the ivie app for tenants means everyone gets the benefit of live energy and environmental data.
Discover how Chameleon can help you turn firefighting into proactive planning. Our Gateway Connect is a simple, scalable solution with a whole host of benefits and use cases.
Get in touch here, or schedule a call with our team below.
