ista at work: The Highland Council

Client

The Highland Council

Solution

Retrofit of existing heat meters, MinuteView, and bespoke portal (BoilerView)

The Highland Council is the biggest single organisation with a Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) Scheme in the country, therefore effective management of the Biomass boilers is essential. Previous to ista’s involvement this was time consuming and difficult due to the geographic location of the sites, and Ofgem audited The Highland Council on a monthly basis.

Initial ista’s solution was trialed at one site. A retrofit of the existing meter was carried out to enable collection of half hourly data. This was then made available on ista’s MinuteView portal allowing The Highland Council to remotely monitor fuel usage, helping flag up when fuel stocks were running low, and predict when fuel would run out.

The trial was deemed a success and the solution was rolled out to 75 sites across the estate. With this increased roll out, fault modules were installed to provide boiler status in near real time and allow any issues to be highlighted via websites, SMS and email alerts. To facilitate this a bespoke web based portal was developed. This has provided a dashboard to be a single point of information across the estate, showing which sites are running as expected, which have a fault, and which are running low on fuel, with data being updated on a half hourly basis.

“Since the roll out of the solution the half hourly data collected from sites has been sent on a daily basis to Ofgem, who have undertaken no more audits, saving both The Highland Council and Ofgem time and money.

Due to the success of this trial, consideration is being given to the future addition of other utilities (such as gas/solar etc.) to support The Highland Council in their monitoring, performance reviews and maintenance of these services.”