District Heating System – Building Management System

During October 2010, based on the requirements of a Large Social Housing Trust, we developed an existing Building Management System installed for New Charter Housing Trust to provide the first Dual Option Billing Platform.

This system has been the choice ‘City West Housing Trust’ for their flagship refurbishment of Barton Village in Salford.

How does it work?

A dual option billing system designed to allow a choice of billing methods within a district heating scheme.
“Collection of rent and utilities is one of social housings greatest challenges in terms of cost per collected.
Collection costs within Social Housing Trusts can exceed £3.00 for every £1.00 collected”

Existing prepayment meters are antiquated and reliant on old technology, using pin numbers or top up cards that have to be physically entered by the tenant. Is it reasonable to expect an elderly tenant to have to leave the premises in the middle of winter to obtain credit?.

Monthly Bill is only a satisfactory option if direct debits are successful and the collection costs are not as shown above. Even with conventional monthly billing, there is no real indication of the monthly total until the bill drops through the tenant’s door. This is often compounded by many Social Housing Landlords opting to bill quarterly to save billing costs.

In summary, a typical block will contain tenants who need a mixture of the above. Those who prove that they can pay reliably by direct debit should be allowed to do so. Direct debit was established for this reason and to make payments easier. There are many tenants who simply do not fall into this category and should therefore pay for their heat on a Prepayment Method.

A Billing Platform that does both!

The Worlds only commercially available Dual Option Billing Platform allowing Landlord to select the billing method:

Key Feature:

• Displays real time information on heat use and cost – no large bill surprises
• Can be switched from monthly to prepayment via User Interface – features tariff   increase facility to collect previous debt.
• BMS allows monitoring of users with low or no credit and access social needs of at risk tenants.
• Set reserve credit on individual basis to allow emergency heat use
• Call for heat button allow tenants to request emergency credit
• Allow landlords to message tenants via digital display line in each flat.

The building management system has two main functions:

1. Monitoring the District Heating System and alerting of any faults or out of range issues.
2. Reading and logging heat use of every heat meter on site

Monitoring the District Heating System

Email Alerting of faults to allow action to be taken before critical failures occur.

Data collection of heat use and efficiencies of solar and biomass etc.

Reading and logging meters [heat, water] of every meter on site:

The system collects and logs all heat use data for each individual heat meter within the block.

This data can be provided in a variety of formats to allow billing by either the landlord or landlord’s representative.

For More Information or a Demonstration please contact us by email or telephone