In more recent times, Legionella control has become an issue to care homes. More and more heath and safety managers are becoming increasingly aware of their responsibilities and the pressure to deliver more with less. Government policy and controlled care fees are making it difficult for these managers to justify budget on indirect costs like water compliance. Many are seeking to employ in-house maintenance managers or ‘experts’ to keep costs down. This approach more often than not leads to a drop in the quality of compliance work if these workers are not fully comptent.The landscape of health and safety has evolved overtime, the water safety field has remained relatively stagnant, but the current COVID19 crisis and more recent developments have propelled the industry into the modern era and address these issues.

The Problem

Monthly temperature monitoring is a core factor of water safety and has traditionally been a manual task handled by an engineer with a probe. This approach naturally had some issues with consistency and accuracy, it was all too common for service visits to be missed or incomplete and even the data collected had the potential to be wrong.

Now a month can be a long time to operate on inaccurate data and when all you have to determine the effectiveness of your control measures is a singular reading, it helps to know that it’s trustworthy. Now what if there was a better way, an option that was not only more effective but provided further benefits, this is where the L8 Remote temperature monitoring device comes in.

The Solution

L8 Remote is an Internet of things product of years of research and development to improve the Legionella control industry. The device itself is a small unsuspecting piece of equipment that can easily be installed in any number of environments and once fitted, simply attached up to 3 sensors to the nearby pipework and system is ready to go.

The system captures temperatures on an hourly basis, within an accuracy of 1%, providing a much more responsive and in-depth picture of the state of water systems. This captured data is transmitted wirelessly through the Sigfox signal network, a better alternative to the power-hungry Wi-Fi or expensive phone networks. An added benefit of this network, in areas where the signal is weaker, the provider may be able to install further transmitters and offer financial renumerations to offset the price.

Once the data is processed, it’s readily available to view through an online portal that holds all data from the units went live, meaning you can analyse and investigate particular patterns or troublesome actions that may be putting the water system at risk.

Our progress so far and benefits delivered

From a practical standpoint, installing remote units not only provides a benefit to the care home but to all parties associated with itspecially during the COVID19 lockdown. We’ve been rolling out the product to all of our customers so far we have installed 1000 units, across 240 properties that are currently using the L8 Remote devices, we’ve been able to reduce the number of service visits by 2000 across the year.

The associated affect of this reduction in service visits means that we’re saving an average of 3.8 cubic tonnes of Co2 emissions and staff that would usually be resigned to mundane monthly checks can now be better utilised in carrying out more specialised work. Associated service costs are also projected to be reduced by an average of 15%. With the lockdown businesses are still able to remain compliant and reduce personnel on site which helps in controlling the spread of COVID19.

Internet of things devices are a driving factor in the future of care homes and L8 Remote is ready to bring water safety into line.