GoKawiilA case for taking your building’s data back — and an argument that what you run at home belongs at work.
Someone walks into my office and asks a simple question: why is there smoke coming from the boiler room?
It’s a fair question, and on this day a strange one. It’s a mild, sunny spring afternoon — the kind of day the heating should barely run at all. And the greenhouse in question is our newly renovated climate greenhouse , rebuilt from the ground up to run without gas in the first place. So why is a gas boiler firing? It should have a fast answer. It doesn’t.
The temperature lives in the climate computer. The heat demand lives in the building management system. The gas and electricity that demand turns into lives in a third system. Whether the heat pump is even online lives in a fourth. To answer one plain question I open five programs, each built by an engineer for an engineer, and line up timestamps by hand. By the time I have an answer, the afternoon is gone.
The answer, when I finally get it, is almost banal: the heat pump had thrown a communication error and silently dropped offline, and the gas boiler did exactly what it was built to do — quietly pick up a load no one was watching. Nothing in the boiler’s own system said why it was running. Nothing in the heat pump’s own system mentioned the boiler. The cause only appears when you put boiler firing next to heat pump offline — two facts sitting in two systems that never talk to each other. Once you see them side by side, it’s obvious. Seeing them side by side was the one thing none of our systems would let me do.
And notice what that question actually is: not an accusation, but a catch. A boiler firing on a sunny day is exactly the thing you want to find, because the alternative is gas quietly burning for days while everyone assumes the heat pump has it covered. You can’t run a greenhouse without gas unless you can see the moments it slips — a fault, a silent fallback — and close them one at a time. The monitoring doesn’t undermine the gas-free promise. It’s what makes the promise keepable.
Let me say where this is happening. I look after the technology at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam — a botanical garden founded in 1638, one of the oldest in the world, packed into a little over a hectare in the middle of the city. It’s beautiful, and underneath the orchids it is also a serious building. Keeping tropical, subtropical, and desert collections alive in the Dutch climate means holding each greenhouse at conditions that don’t exist outside: heat pumps, gas boilers, a thermal store, climate computers, several hundred sensors, all running day and night. A garden like this is a heavy industrial control problem wearing a very pretty coat.
The Climate House dashboard in Home Assistant — desert, cape, and tropical zones with a live map of sensor locations.
This is not bad luck. It’s a structure.
Here’s the part that should bother you: the data already exists. We generate it every second. We paid for the sensors that produce it. None of it is missing.
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