Heat Decay.
Heat decay is how quickly a home loses warmth once the heating goes off. Homes with poor insulation cool down faster, making them harder and more expensive to keep warm.
This can lead to underheating, discomfort, and even fuel poverty, especially in colder months. It also creates the ideal conditions for condensation and damp. Ensuring properties are properly insulated helps tenants keep their house warm, which in turns leads to healthier properties.
How is it identified?
Most landlords rely on complaints or EPC data, but these don’t show how a home performs in real life. Heat decay is invisible - but its impact isn’t.
In an ideal home, the temperature should remain stable for a period after the heating is switched off, with warmth retained by effective insulation, glazing and ventilation. This slow release of heat keeps the property comfortable, reduces energy bills, and helps avoid excess moisture in the air.
When heat escapes too quickly, homes cool down fast, tenants may overcompensate with heating, and condensation starts to build. Over time, this leads to increased damp, mould growth, and a rising volume of reactive repairs that could have been prevented with early detection.
Poor insulation ✔
Reactive Maintenance ✔
Heat Loss Patterns ✔
The Facts
Retrofit Insight
Our data helps you prioritise properties for retrofit programmes, leading to targeted interventions and funding being directed where it’s needed most, removing guesswork and strengthening your business cases when applying for grants or planning upgrades. Our data also offers a clear picture of thermal performance post-intervention, helping you validate improvements and demonstrate success against EPC and Net-Zero targets.
Informed Asset Planning
Heat decay data enables smarter investment in heating and insulation upgrades. Understand how well existing solutions like Heat Pumps or insulation are performing and use this to plan future asset improvements with confidence.
How iOpt can help.
iOpt sensors monitor temperature patterns to calculate heat retention. We help you identify cold, inefficient homes early. Our data supports retrofit planning, validates upgrades, and shows when issues are linked to property condition—not tenant behaviour.
iOpt tracks temperature drop over time, showing how well a property retains heat. This makes it easy to spot which homes need insulation or ventilation upgrades.
iOpt’s bespoke data platform helps social housing providers proactively manage heat decay. By tracking temperature patterns and heat loss, it identifies areas of poor insulation or inefficient heating, allowing for early interventions that improve energy efficiency and tenant comfort.
Detect.
By installing iOpt sensors in your property you will receive real-time information about the condition of that property. This allows for predictive and proactive planning and more informed decisions regarding the tenant, their property and how it can be heated so it is safe and warm.
Prevent.
Because you have real-time visibility of the conditions and usage of your assets, you’ll have all the information you’ll need to be able to make much more informed decisions when it comes to diagnosing potential issues, handling tenant complaints and deciding which properties need repairs most urgently.
Protect.
By alerting you to potential issues before they arise, you can ensure healthier buildings, but more importantly, healthier tenants. It’s well-document how damp and mould can affect tenants and has been directly linked to an increased likelihood of asthma in children, so identifying these problems early can improve the tenants quality of life as well as the value of your asset.
Get in touch
Speak with one of our sensor-tech specialists and book your iOpt platform demo today.