Using remote sensors to manage homes in isolated communities
Russell Virtue, relationship manager at home life safety specialist Aico, explains how environmental monitoring is helping upgrade homes on the Hebridean island of Tiree
Russell Virtue, relationship manager at home life safety specialist Aico, explains how environmental monitoring is helping upgrade homes on the Hebridean island of Tiree (sponsored) #UKhousingIn association with:
Home safety device specialist Aico has played a central role in supporting West Highland Housing Association’s initiative to modernise housing management on Tiree, one of Scotland’s most geographically remote communities. With the island located 60 miles from the mainland, routine maintenance and inspections are logistically challenging, making it difficult to respond swiftly to issues such as damp and mould, poor ventilation and heating inefficiencies.
To address these challenges, West Highland Housing Association deployed Aico’s environmental sensors as part of a pilot scheme across a handful of properties. The sensors monitor key environmental factors in real time – including temperature, humidity and air quality – and transmit this data to Aico’s HomeLINK Portal. This enables housing staff to access actionable insights into conditions that could contribute to damp and mould, poor energy efficiency, fuel poverty and indoor air quality concerns.
Aico’s involvement extends beyond technology provision. Through hands-on training and onboarding support, Aico ensured the housing team could effectively navigate the HomeLINK platform and make the most of the data insights available. This proactive approach helps property managers tackle issues early, improving tenant well-being and reducing the cost and disruption of reactive maintenance.
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This pilot is part of a much wider shift across the UK. Housing providers are increasingly adopting environmental sensor technology to enhance property oversight and support sustainability goals. More than 500,000 connected devices have now been installed in homes nationwide, with Aico partnering with numerous housing associations and local authorities.
These solutions are being used not only to improve tenant outcomes, but also to ensure compliance, reduce carbon emissions and inform long-term asset management strategies.
Aico’s collaboration with West Highland Housing Association highlights the potential of smart technology to transform housing management, particularly in remote or resource-constrained areas.
By enabling data-led decision-making, Aico is contributing to safer, healthier and more sustainable homes across the UK.
Russell Virtue, west Scotland relationship manager, Aico
Far-flung efficiency for islands
West Highland HA’s Brett Sadler tells Inside Housing sensors are crucial to monitor the conditions of homes in remote communities
You might not expect one of the UK’s sunniest spots to be in the Inner Hebrides, but Tiree isn’t called The Sunshine Isle for nothing. Just 12 miles long and three miles wide, the island is fringed to its west by the Gulf Stream, giving it a famously mild climate.
That said, Tiree is also a windy place. If you were to sail westward, you wouldn’t make landfall until you hit northern Newfoundland, and there are very few trees on the island to offer shelter from the Atlantic weather. The wind keeps the midges away in summer, but it can be a nuisance to households without adequate insulation, especially in the cooler months.
“Our tenants were saying they were finding it quite cold, and the wind was up quite often,” says Brett Sadler, chief executive of 835-home West Highland Housing Association, which has 16 properties on Tiree.
“So we had it on our agenda. We needed to do something with the properties.”
Remote communities
The chosen solution was internal wall insulation. The feedback from West Highland’s tenants was positive, Mr Sadler says; they noticed a “marked difference” in the warmth of their homes.
These retrofit works fundamentally changed the properties, however. This is why West Highland installed Aico HomeLINK sensors in six of the homes.
“We put the sensors in to see whether the insulation is still doing what we expect it to. They give us ongoing monitoring of some of the key aspects, like humidity, air quality and temperature, just to see how the insulation is working… and to make sure it keeps doing what it’s supposed to,” Mr Sadler says.
“But we won’t know [for sure] until we get further down the line. This will give us a bit more information about what the actual effects are, whether we need to change anything in future, or whether we think we did put the right solution in place.
“[The sensors] are really helpful,” he adds.
The remote sensors have proved especially useful in what is a very remote community. Tiree is a four-hour ferry ride from the landlord’s headquarters in Oban, and there are just seven sailings every week. The only other way to travel there is by plane.
“You can’t get out there quickly. So if a tenant says there’s an issue with their property, one of the things we can do now is check what the sensors are telling us,” says Mr Sadler.
“We do have contractors on the island – an electrician and a general contractor – so we can do bits and pieces, but we can’t get the staff out quickly to the island.
4
Duration of ferry ride (in hours) Tiree is from West Highland’s headquarters in Oban
6
Number of properties on the island in which Aico HomeLINK sensors were installed
“That’s just not doable, so this allows us to do something a bit better. And, ultimately, what we’re trying to get to here is just delivering a better service for the tenants,” he continues.
Almost one-third of West Highlands’ properties are on Scottish islands, and the organisation is prioritising those homes in its retrofit programme. Working on these far-flung properties is more complicated and more expensive than on the mainland, because all the materials and contractors have to be ferried across.
The logistics alone add an extra layer of complexity. “Doing the internal wall installation on Tiree, tenants had to be decanted for quite a period, and that’s a pretty big exercise,” says Mr Sadler.
His organisation managed it by keeping one home empty and using holiday accommodation elsewhere on the island. These considerations shape the organisation’s approach to its decarbonisation programmes on the islands.
“So what we tend to do is go for a whole-house retrofit: package stuff together rather than go out and do just one thing. It’s better for the tenant and it’s cheaper for us in the long term,” says Mr Sadler.
Better-informed decisions
Gathering data on the efficacy of up-and-running retrofit measures, as well as on resident behaviour – whether they open windows, for example – mean being able to make better-informed decisions before starting work on other homes. This is especially so in remote places like Tiree, and the sensor technology has been particularly useful when it comes to West Highland’s island communities.
“If this works as we think it will, we can start to consider rolling [sensors] out to the properties where we have maybe more issues that we need to monitor or things we just want to pay attention to. So whether we install sensors in every property or not... I think we will definitely use more of them in properties that we want to monitor closely,” says Mr Sadler.
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