Real-time building data from The Utopi Platform flagged six consecutive days with no occupancy in a room recorded as occupied, during a period when no flushing was scheduled.
Outside term time, weekly flushing covers a building that is largely empty and stagnation is the obvious risk. During term time the regime is usually paused, and that holds for most rooms, but not all. A resident who goes home for a fortnight, travels, or stays elsewhere for a few weeks remains on the occupancy list while the water in their pipework sits unused.
Scenario
At a mid-sized PBSA scheme in Spain, real-time building data from The Utopi Platform flagged a room that had registered no occupancy for six consecutive days, while room temperature held between 21.9°C and 22.9°C throughout, inside the 20°C to 45°C band in which legionella multiplies. The room was not made risky by standing empty, but by the fact that the water stopped moving.
One room over one term is a single example, not a portfolio-wide measurement. The behaviour behind it is familiar to anyone running student accommodation: Residents go home, travel or stay elsewhere for several days at a time throughout term, and their rooms stay on the occupancy list while they are gone. In southern European assets, rooms hold that temperature band for longer. Biofilm, stagnation, and aerosolisation potential all sit alongside temperature in any risk assessment, but the variable operators can act on day to day is simpler: Whether the water is moving.
Resolution
Legionella risk monitoring on The Utopi Platform is built to surface these risks automatically. Rather than counting days, it analyses how long a room has been unoccupied against how warm the water in it is likely to be, so the risk is seasonally weighted. Rooms are then banded low, medium or high, and operations teams see which spaces need attention from a single view.
With room-level visibility like this, you can increase flushing where a gap in occupancy has been identified, and reduce it where it is not needed. Flushing led by real-time occupancy and temperature data lets you target individual rooms over the summer rather than covering every room in the building, saving operations teams time and money while building compliance certainty.
Data
- 6 consecutive days with no room-level occupancy detected, in a room recorded as occupied throughout
- Room temperature stayed between 21.9°C and 22.9°C, inside the 20°C to 45°C range in which legionella multiplies, per recognised guidance
The Utopi Platform monitors building performance across 13 countries. Want to see which rooms are at risk across your European portfolio? Arrange to meet a member of our expert team: www.utopi.co.uk/contact/