The problem
“Smart buildings” is often marketed as a shiny dashboard. In reality, building operations is a discipline of constraints: mixed estates, uneven fabric, legacy plant, and competing priorities across safety, comfort, cost, and compliance. Many operators inherit older BMS deployments that were designed for a different era. They may provide basic control and scheduled reporting, but they frequently struggle to deliver what modern operations teams need: real-time visibility, meaningful alerts, and a clear trail of evidence that stands up when incidents are reviewed.
The operational pain usually shows up in the same places. Temperature and humidity drift goes unnoticed until comfort complaints land, energy consumption escalates, or sensitive environments become risky. Door openings, access patterns, and out-of-hours activity can be invisible or scattered across systems. Consumables and facilities issues, like bin-full conditions, can become labour-intensive because they rely on routine rounds rather than clear triggers. Safety-adjacent systems such as smoke and heat detection may exist, but data is not always integrated into a single operational picture.
Water safety and compliance introduces another layer. If you manage estates with hot and cold water systems, you need to control risk, document what was done, and reduce the cost of repetitive routine tasks. This is exactly where operations teams feel the drag: planned schedules, manual checks, and uncertainty about what actually happened between visits.
Scoping and operating model
Squared Technologies scoped the delivery as a full-stack modernisation, designed to work with real estates rather than idealised greenfield sites. That meant starting with an operating model: who receives alerts, what actions are expected, what constitutes “evidence”, and how information needs to be presented so it can be used by facilities teams, compliance stakeholders, and service partners without friction.
We also set a hard boundary around value. Telemetry is not valuable because it exists. It is valuable when it reduces uncertainty and turns into decisions. For each sensing category we defined success in operational terms: earlier detection, fewer wasted call-outs, reduced time-to-diagnosis, and a platform experience that makes the state of an estate obvious within seconds.
From a technical perspective, the scope covered on-site sensing, low-power telemetry where required, ingestion and normalisation, alerting and notification workflows, dashboards, and secure data handling. Where building fabric is complex, sub‑GHz RF (including 433 MHz) can be a practical tool because of propagation behaviour through structures. We treat that as an engineering choice, not a marketing line. The right design depends on layout, materials, and the operational constraints of the site.
What we delivered
The delivered system brings disparate building signals into one operational view: real-time temperature and humidity monitoring, door opening and access-adjacent telemetry, condition monitoring such as bin-full signals, and safety-aligned signals including smoke, heat, and thermal detection where appropriate. The objective is to make the estate legible in real time, so operators can see abnormal conditions early rather than discovering them at the end of a reporting period.
We also integrated compliance-facing capabilities where estates require them, including water safety monitoring and automated workflows that reduce the cost of scheduled maintenance. Operators do not want teams driving long distances to perform short, repetitive tasks that can be automated safely. Where automated flushing, temperature evidence, and related control can be designed responsibly, it can remove a meaningful operational burden while improving evidence and consistency.
In some environments, additional control actions are required, including automated isolation components such as motorised valves or stopcocks. We treat these as part of a controlled engineering programme, with clear safety requirements and environment-specific design. The point is not to add complexity. The point is to reduce risk and reduce uncertainty through measured control and evidence.
The platform was built to support multi-site estates. Real organisations operate portfolios: buildings have different profiles, different stakeholders, and different tolerance for risk. The platform separates organisational access cleanly and presents a coherent event timeline, so incidents can be reviewed without stitching together fragmented data sources.
Secure handling is not optional in modern estates, especially where data influences compliance actions or safety-adjacent decisions. This is why we anchor these deployments in the capability to deliver secure ingestion and evidence-grade telemetry. See Secure data platforms and Bespoke IoT solutions.
Pilot, validation, and tuning
Building programmes fail when they skip validation. A sensor that works on a bench can behave differently in plant rooms, risers, ceilings, kitchens, or older structures. Squared Technologies therefore staged delivery with a pilot designed to validate telemetry behaviour, confirm signal reliability, and tune alert thresholds so the system produced action rather than fatigue.
We validated real-time temperature analytics and condition monitoring against actual site dynamics. That includes normal daily cycles, seasonal variation, and “expected anomalies” such as door traffic peaks. The goal is not to eliminate variability. The goal is to make it obvious when conditions leave the safe or expected envelope and to communicate that clearly to the right people.
Fine-tuning is where performance becomes operational. We refined the thresholds, the notification routing, and the platform views so that engineers, facilities teams, and compliance stakeholders each see what they need without wading through irrelevant noise. This is the difference between an IoT demo and a building system that a team trusts at 02:00.
Conclusion
The outcome is a modern estate telemetry and control programme that improves clarity, reduces wasted effort, and supports compliance through evidence rather than best-effort paperwork. Operators gain real-time visibility into the conditions that drive cost and risk, and they gain a platform that supports investigation and improvement rather than just “monitoring for monitoring’s sake”.
Squared Technologies builds these systems end to end: sensors, RF telemetry where appropriate, firmware, secure ingestion, alerting, and the platform layer. If you are replacing legacy BMS assumptions with modern operational truth across buildings and estates, start with Contact and reference smart buildings and estates. We will scope around your operating model, validate the environment, and deliver a system that survives real deployment constraints.
For related work, see Automated Legionella compliance and Environmental monitoring.