Smart Building

European standard EN 16798-1 grades indoor air quality by CO2 concentration above outdoor air: 550 ppm for Category I, 800 ppm for Category II and 1,350 ppm for Category III. With outdoor air at roughly 420 ppm, the usual office target of Category II works out to about 1,200 ppm absolute, and readings that sit beyond Category III mean the space is underventilated for its occupancy.

Demand-controlled ventilation uses those readings as a control signal. Instead of running fans on fixed schedules sized for a full building, the air handling system modulates fresh air per zone based on measured CO2. Field and simulation studies report HVAC energy reductions of 9 to 33 percent, with fan savings of 25 to 55 percent in spaces with variable occupancy such as meeting rooms and open plan offices. An IoT platform closes the loop by feeding room level CO2 into the ventilation control and alerting when any zone drifts out of its category.

Legionella multiplies between 20 and 45 degrees Celsius, so every control scheme comes down to keeping hot water hot and cold water cold. UK guidance HSG274 Part 2 asks for storage calorifiers at 60 degrees or above, hot water reaching outlets at 50 degrees or more within one minute (55 in healthcare), and cold water below 20 degrees, with monthly checks at sentinel taps. In Spain, Real Decreto 487/2022 sets equivalent temperature requirements and a documented prevention and control plan for every affected building.

PT1000 probes on tanks, return loops and sentinel outlets turn that manual routine into continuous telemetry: every reading is logged automatically, a loop that drops below threshold raises an alert the same day instead of waiting for the next monthly round, and the stored series becomes the audit trail an inspector asks for.

Yes, and it is the most common starting point. Battery powered LoRaWAN sensors mount on a wall or ceiling in minutes, run 5 to 10 years on their cells and reach a gateway through several floors and walls, so a typical office building is covered with one or two indoor gateways. No conduits, no fire barrier penetrations, no disturbing tenants.

That changes the economics of retrofits: instrumenting a room costs a sensor plus minutes of labour rather than a cabling project, so coverage can grow floor by floor. Wired infrastructure that already exists, such as meters on RS-485 or points on the BMS, joins the same platform through gateways instead of being replaced.

Through gateways, without touching the control logic. A small industrial gateway or edge PC running Node-RED polls the BMS or its field devices, using Modbus TCP/RTU and BACnet/IP nodes to read temperatures, setpoints, meter registers and alarm points, and forwards them to Thinger.io over MQTT. The built-in Node-RED plugin makes this a supported path in both directions: the same flow can write values back, for example adjusting a setpoint from an occupancy rule, while the BMS keeps running its safety interlocks locally.

The result is one layer above the whole building. BACnet air handlers, Modbus energy meters and LoRaWAN retrofit sensors land in the same buckets, dashboards and alert rules, and everything is exposed again through a REST API for FM software or energy reporting tools.

It depends on the number of buildings, the points monitored and the integration work, so most projects are quoted individually, but the orders of magnitude are known. Retrofit hardware is modest: a LoRaWAN indoor air quality sensor costs on the order of 100 to 250 euros per room, and a Modbus three phase meter with current transformers stays in a similar range per electrical panel, with installation measured in minutes rather than days.

On the platform side, our Private Cloud plans are published on the pricing page and start at 49 euros per month for a dedicated instance, which is usually enough to run a first building end to end. Larger portfolios and on premise deployments are sized per project.

Yes, that is the model the platform is designed around. Devices, dashboards and users are organized per project, so a facility operator, ESCO or property manager runs every building from one instance while each site keeps its own devices, data and alert rules. Per-user permissions decide exactly what a tenant, a maintenance contractor or a building manager can see and do.

Licenses include white label branding, so the operator serves its customers under its own name and domain: each tenant logs into a portal with the operator's brand and sees only its floor or building, while the operations team keeps a portfolio wide view for benchmarking consumption and dispatching maintenance.