Switchee is a tech start-up company supplying smart tech to make social homes more efficient. But how does it work and how much can you save? The experts explain
What does Switchee do?
Switchee is a British tech start-up that aims to improve the quality of life for residents in social housing by ensuring everyone has safe, warm, healthy homes. Working with over 130 social housing providers, and installed in tens of thousands of homes, our Switchee device is an innovative thermostat that uses smart solutions to tackle some of the most difficult in-home challenges including the cost-of-living crisis, fuel poverty, and mould and damp. Using this information can help lower heating bills and make resident properties more efficient.
What types of sensors does Switchee use?
Switchee uses multiple sensors to understand your home environment. This data is then used to produce a landlord dashboard that displays a range of maintenance and alerts about mould risk, poor insulation, fuel poverty risk, heating system performance.
This information enables your landlord to be more proactive in the way they manage your home. This early intervention can resolve issues such as mould or insulation deficiencies more quickly, and improve living conditions. Residents can save about 17% on their fuel bills by having Switchee installed.
How does the system work?
Switchee quantitatively measures the number of households living in fuel poverty, defined by homes that haven’t reached a temperature of 18°C whilst occupied in any of the past 30 days. According to Public Health England, 18°C is the minimum indoor temperature required to prevent health risks. By providing this data, Switchee enables housing providers to measure the impact of retrofit works on fuel poverty effectively. In cases where residents remain in fuel poverty despite retrofits, Switchee can identify these households and offer direct-to-device energy vouchers to residents, providing immediate relief.
How can Switchee reduce energy use?
Switchee’s insights allow energy savings through optimised heating systems. Receiving over 16 billion data points per year, it generates real-time insights to facilitate an efficient energy transition. Switchee’s service allows housing providers to understand which social homes would benefit most from retrofit intervention ensuring the worst insulated homes become energy efficient.
How can residents and housing associations get support for using Switchee?
Our website provides support for both residents and housing associations: www.switchee.com. We have a dedicated installation and customer support team to answer any queries.
How can Switchee be used to communicate with residents?
Switchee provides two-way communication with tenants where secure messages, surveys and energy advice can be sent directly to residents via the in-home display. With a typical response rate of 88% within 24 hours Switchee’s dashboard offers a cost-effective and secure platform, allowing tenants anonymity while communicating with housing providers. For example, Switchee received a survey response rate of 90% within the first 24 hours which is significantly higher than the 11-15% experienced by providers using traditional communication methods.
What is the Switchee Summit about?
Switchee’s summits will bring the social housing sector together to dive into discussion on the future of affordable housing and delivering safe, smart, sustainable homes for social housing residents. Switchee will hold three free annual summits: London on 19 November 2024; Manchester on 6 November 2024; Dudley on 4 February 2025. These in-person events are a chance for industry leaders and innovators to work together to tackle pressing challenges like fuel poverty, damp and mould, decarbonisation and resident engagement. For more information visit: https://switchee.com/switchee-summit/
What is the story behind Switchee?
With a vision to improve the quality of life for people living in rented homes, Adam Fudakowski founded Switchee with his late partner Ian Napier in 2015. As an accomplished entrepreneur and innovator in the field of smart home technology, he has revolutionised the property management industry in social housing. Switchee combines the technology and social housing sectors, with its primary customers being social housing providers. Switchee is a team of over 100 passionate and ambitious people driven by a collective desire to make a positive impact in the UK social housing sector, both for residents and landlords. A data analytics and insights company that believes in the power of data to do good, we work with over 130 housing providers from all across the UK, including Caledonia, Fairhive and Peabody. Our aim is simply to improve the lives of people living in rented homes.
Our CEO Tom Robins is passionate about enabling change. He says: “The quality of social housing has been in the spotlight since the tragic death of Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old who died in 2020 after exposure to mould in the rented flat where he lived in Rochdale.
“There is a continual trend here of setting a much higher bar of expectation in housing standards, and we’re seeing landlords embracing that and looking for technology solutions that they can deliver a more efficient, effective service.”
Where can I find out more about Switchee?
Visit our website: https://switchee.com
