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Boilers get smart tech upgrade

Sponsored by Aico

The inaugural winner of the Inside Housing Innovation Week Award, supported by Aico, was Yorkshire Housing. We look at why its plan to install smart technology to monitor boilers caught the eye of judges

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Yorkshire Housing owns and manages 20,000 homes across Yorkshire, including Lairds Way in Sheffield (pictured)
Yorkshire Housing owns and manages 20,000 homes across Yorkshire, including Lairds Way in Sheffield (pictured)
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The inaugural winner of the @Insidehousing #innovationhousinguk award was @yhousing. We look at why its plan to upgrade boilers with smart tech caught the eye of the judges to win them £10,000 #UKhousing @Aico_Limited (sponsored)

Entries are now open for this year’s @Insidehousing Innovation Week Award – visit insidehousing.co.uk/innovationweek to find out how to enter #innovationhousinguk

For the chance to win £10,000 for a new project, enter @Insidehousing Innovation Week Award, visit insidehousing.co.uk/innovationweek to find out how to enter #innovationhousinguk

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For Darren Williams and colleagues at Yorkshire Housing, it wasn’t just the £10,000 prize money that made entering last year’s Inside Housing competition for landlords that are using technology to improve the delivery of services an attractive proposition. They also saw it as an opportunity to shout about plans for – and the benefits of – technologically connected homes.

“Our chief executive has a big ambition around smart homes and being more pre-emptive than reactive,” says Mr Williams, who as lead innovator was part of the team that led on the Inside Housing Innovation Week Award entry. “I thought entering the award would demonstrate what we were trying to do as an organisation.”

Staff at the association already had concepts prepared for several trials of such technology – something they had termed the ‘smart home pilot’. The specific initiative they decided to enter related to more efficient management of gas boilers, and it ultimately scooped the inaugural Innovation Week Award.


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Yorkshire Housing scoops inaugural Inside Housing Innovation Week AwardYorkshire Housing scoops inaugural Inside Housing Innovation Week Award

The idea was to retrofit 50 boilers with smart controls, making it possible to remotely monitor the performance of boilers and for engineers to see fault codes before attending a property. With the housing association receiving around 5,000 emergency calls on boiler performance from 2019-20 alone – spending £630,450 on addressing them – there was a confidence that, if funded, the project could make a real difference.

“We’d already been looking at budgeting for the project,” says Mr Williams. “And actually, the prize money was pretty much exactly what we’d have been looking at for that – to fit the controls into 50 homes
is about £10,000. So it worked out really well.”

He continues: “We cover a very large patch – all of Yorkshire, 100 miles north to south, east to west. There’s a real possibility that somebody might be doing a boiler repair job somewhere, then drive two hours to do a job somewhere else, then get there and they haven’t got the right parts. So if we can start to get some information early, then that engineer can go fully prepared for the job. That cuts down on wasted time, revisits and carbon that we’re putting out from our journeys.”

Judges

Nick Atkin, chief executive, Yorkshire Housing

Martin Hilditch, editor, Inside Housing

Chris Jones, chief executive, HomeLINK

Annette Pass, head of innovation, Highways England

Marlene Price, resident, York Road Estate

Gavin Smart, chief executive, Chartered Institute of Housing

Real-time data

Other real-time data from the smart controls will give better insights on the health of the boiler. The smart controls will send us an alert before the tenant realises it might need a repair. This will increase the service and efficiency with which residents can heat their homes – something that has become even more relevant in the past month due to the increase in energy prices, and it will help us understand the likely life cycle of the boiler.

It was a concept that captured the imaginations of the judging panel for the award. Gavin Smart, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, says what impressed him most “was how clearly you could see that the proposed innovation could be brought to bear on a real-world problem, in a way that would have benefits for tenants, as well as for the landlord”.

The potential replicability of the idea also appealed to the panel. “It felt like a small amount of money could potentially ignite a big return for the whole sector,” recalls Chris Jones, chief executive of HomeLINK. “The overall impact could be huge.”

In numbers

50
Boilers to be retrofitted with smart controls

£630,000
Yorkshire Housing’s spend on repairing boilers in 2019-20

In May, work starts in earnest on realising that opportunity. That is when the innovation team from Yorkshire Housing will claim another part of their prize: a day’s consultancy at Aico – a supporter of Inside Housing Innovation Week – of which HomeLINK forms a part.

Lauren Hemmings, ICT service development manager at Yorkshire Housing, says she is looking forward to it.

“When you’re innovating, you need space to be creative; to do that creative thinking; to think differently. If we can get away from our desks for a day or two, it will be brilliant.”

Ms Hemmings is also developing plans to give the team a firm identity, and she partly credits the award with making that possible. “It’s enabled me to move into a space where we can give ourselves a brand, a vision and a purpose,” she says. “It’s enabled us to reset our purpose and given us an identity, to be able to sell to the rest of the business and to other organisations exactly what innovation means at Yorkshire Housing.”

How to enter

Yorkshire Housing receives the Innovation Week Award last year from Inside Housing editor Martin Hilditch and Aico’s Daniel Little
Yorkshire Housing receives the Innovation Week Award last year from Inside Housing editor Martin Hilditch and Aico’s Daniel Little

Entries are now open for this year’s Inside Housing Innovation Week Award, with the winner once again receiving £10,000 and support to develop their idea.

Entering involves creating a three-minute ‘elevator pitch’ video and supplying some brief written information on your project. Following a public vote, the final winner will be decided by our expert judging panel.

The winner will be announced at an exclusive event taking place during Inside Housing Innovation Week 2022, which runs from 7-11 November 2022.

See more at www.insidehousing.co.uk/innovationweek