Sensors and indoor climate

Adding measurements the automation system does not provide: room sensors for temperature, CO₂ and humidity, condition monitoring on equipment, and ways to read machines that have no data interface at all.

The automation system tells you what the plant is doing. Sensors tell you what the people in the building are actually experiencing, and whether the equipment sounds healthy. Those are different questions, and they usually need different hardware.

This is the group you add to. Where the automation system has no sensor — a meeting room nobody measures, a machine with no output at all — a sensor closes the gap without touching the automation.

Room sensors

These are the sensors behind the indoor climate table, the room colours on a floor plan, and any alarm about a room being too warm or too stuffy.

Airthings — room multisensors. Depending on the model, temperature, CO₂, humidity, air pressure and radon.

Disruptive Technologies — very small wireless sensors with long battery life, useful for temperature and for detecting contact, movement or water where running cable is impractical. Their size is the point: they can be placed after the fact, in a room that is already finished.

ICMeter — a Danish supplier of room multisensors.

Wireless sensors via a Smartwatt gateway — CO₂, temperature, humidity and motion, reaching Properate through a gateway in the building rather than each sensor talking to the internet on its own. See Building automation and control.

What is needed from you: the sensors installed, and — for the cloud-based ones — an account with the supplier that Properate is allowed to read from. Properate does not require you to move away from your supplier's own app; it reads alongside it.

Condition monitoring on equipment

These answer a different question: not "is the room comfortable" but "is this machine about to fail".

Soundsensing — microphones mounted on equipment. Beyond recording sound, it carries models that recognise when a machine is starting to behave abnormally. This gives you early warning on rotating equipment without dismantling anything or fitting sensors inside it.

Reading equipment that has no data interface

Plenty of building equipment has no connectivity whatsoever, and replacing it to get data is rarely worth it. Two integrations exist precisely for that case.

Indicator lamp detection — a camera and image recognition read the indicator lamps on a machine's front panel, and turn "the red light is on" into data. It is a pragmatic answer for a pump, a compressor or a legacy panel that will never speak a protocol.

Waste bin detection — image recognition that tells full bins from empty ones. See Waste.

Local weather

Netatmo — a weather station at the building itself. Useful where the nearest public weather station is not representative — a coastal or high-altitude site, or a building in a city where local conditions differ from the official measurement point. See Weather and climate data.

What you get out of it

Sensor data is not just for looking at. Once a room is measured:

It appears in the indoor climate table and on the floor plan, so a problem is visible in position rather than as a row in a list.

You can set thresholds per room type, so a meeting room and a corridor are not judged by the same standard.

You get documentation — which matters when a tenant reports that it is always cold, and when a certification scheme asks for evidence rather than assurances.

You can drive control from it. A CO₂ reading is only interesting if something acts on it, and ventilation can be automated against measured air quality instead of a fixed schedule.

If a sensor goes quiet

Check the age of the value first. Hovering a value shows when the last datapoint arrived. That distinguishes a sensor that is reporting an unwelcome number from one that stopped reporting weeks ago.

Battery devices do stop. Wireless sensors have a finite battery life, and a flat battery looks exactly like a broken integration.

After a building update, sensors can vanish from a floor plan. This normally means sensor identifiers changed; the sensors simply need adding to the plan again.