Camden Court is an on-campus student accommodation building in Newcastle upon Tyne, operated by Unite Students in partnership with Northumbria University. Home to over 350 students, it offers en-suite rooms with private bedroom and bathroom and shared kitchens and lounges, and fully self-contained studios. The building is a few minutes’ walk from Northumbria’s main campus and around 10 minutes from Newcastle city centre.
About the site
Camden Court is an on-campus student accommodation building in Newcastle upon Tyne, operated by Unite Students in partnership with Northumbria University. Home to over 350 students, it offers en-suite rooms with private bedroom and bathroom and shared kitchens and lounges, and fully self-contained studios. The building is a few minutes’ walk from Northumbria’s main campus and around 10 minutes from Newcastle city centre.
An opportunity to prove the Irus ecoSystem’s real-world benefits
Camden Court was a chance to do more than upgrade the heating. Unite Students wanted to raise the bar for how a building looks after the people living in it. That meant homes that feel comfortable and safe, lower energy use, and smarter use of water. It also meant a team that can spot and fix small issues early, often before residents notice anything at all. The goal was simple: give residents a better place to live and give the operations team the control and visibility to keep it that way every day.
The Irus ecoSystem helps to achieve this. Monitoring equipment and controls for heating, hot water and in-room safety work quietly in the background, so residents stay warm and comfortable without having to think about it. It also gives operators a clear, live view of what’s happening across their buildings. That means they can use energy more wisely, spot small issues early, and focus their time on residents, not on repairs.
Over the last 10 years, Unite Students and Prefect Controls have developed Irus together, adding new hardware, software and data insight along the way. Unite Students brought the real-world view. They ran day-to-day delivery, offered live buildings to test new ideas, rolled Irus out across the estate, and gathered feedback from residents. Prefect Controls brought the technology, leading development, innovation, system design and integration.
Installed across around 100 Unite Students sites and 40,000 rooms, Irus saved 18.2 million kWh and more than 4,500 tonnes of carbon last year alone.
“Together we’ve created something that’s delivering measurable value across our estate, helping us to significantly reduce our energy consumption and carbon emissions while supporting resident comfort. It has focused on student experience as much as operational efficiency and given us far greater visibility of building performance, helping us to deliver more consistent room temperatures, faster fault resolution and healthier living environments for students.”
Ian Bamforth, Head of Estates, Unite Students
What’s included at Camden Court?
The installation, covering 345 rooms across 65 flats and 21 studios, took seven weeks start to finish – an entire building brought onto one connected system, with every module reporting back through the Irus portal – complete control, visibility and intelligence.
- SpaceHeat controls heating and monitors indoor environmental data including temperature, energy use, occupancy, humidity, light and noise. It delivers heat to electric panel heaters only when necessary, optimising efficiency while alerting managers to unusual conditions, like poor air quality or extreme temperatures. 418 ControlSensors give residents local control of their heating while operators retain centralised oversight.
- SmartTank monitors and controls water heating, measures water use by volume, and detects leaks and wastage such as tundish flow, a significant but avoidable waste of heated water. 65 SmartTanks were upgraded from the ‘smart-ready’ cylinders fitted in an earlier 2023 phase, additional integration enabled both hot and cold-water monitoring, and exposed pipework was lagged.
- WaterSense. PipeSense sits on taps and toilets to catch continuous flow that signal a drip or a leak, and tracks water temperature to support Legionella risk management. 345 units monitor outlet supply pipes across the building. ShowerSense starts a timer when showers begin and shows residents how their use compares with their peers, gentle nudges aimed to affect behavioural change. 345 units also watch bathroom humidity, flagging conditions that lead to damp and mould before they take hold.
- LeakDetect. A layered system of automatic shut-off valves and detection pads isolate water at exactly the right level, plant room, incoming supply, overflow, an entire floor, or a single flat. A leak in one flat will isolate one flat, not the whole building.
- UtilityMeter measures electricity at flat and studio level, integrated with the building’s existing three-phase boards, and water throughput at the tanks. High consumption in individual rooms initiates an alert and becomes instantly visible on the central portal.
- HobSensus. This kitchen safety module monitors cooking energy use and watches for hobs left unattended, cutting the power automatically if the surface reaches a dangerous temperature. Every event is logged, so repeat near-misses are visible, prompting appropriate action to be taken. Fitted to all 115 electric hobs in the building, the units were mounted onto the existing stainless-steel splashbacks and use battery modules to avoid hardwiring and the disruption that would entail.
- Direct-to-Room Communication
As part of the Prefect Behaviour Sustainability Initiative, this lets operators send: - Messages to a single room or the whole building at once: maintenance schedules, fire alarm testing, a parcel waiting in reception. These messages reach residents directly rather than relying on a noticeboard or an email that goes unread.
- Nudges, automatic messages generated by what’s actually happening in a room: suggestions to ventilate when humidity is high, a prompt to discuss heating profiles after frequent boost-button use, or a nudge toward more economical use when water or electricity consumption is unusually high. Each nudge is timed to the moment it can most affect behaviour.
- Instructions, so residents can find out how the system works any time via a QR code on the ControlSensor, linking to an instructional video.
The result
Camden Court becomes the UK’s most optimised retrofit site and gives Unite Students something few operators in the sector have: full visibility of a building’s energy, water and safety performance, down to individual room level, with the ability to act automatically the moment issues arise. It’s the clearest proof yet of what the Irus ecoSystem was built to do, enable a building to communicate its performance and flag potential issues to the operator in a way that’s easy to understand.
