A building management system that doesn't need a cable to every sensor.
Most South African buildings have no BMS — not because owners don't want one, but because a wired system usually costs more to install than to buy, and you cannot pull cable through an occupied, finished building without disrupting the people paying rent in it. addanode builds its BMS on LoRaWAN: battery-powered sensors, one gateway covering a whole building, no cable runs, installed in days. That works for a new build — and it is the only thing that works economically for the buildings that already exist.
The barrier was never the sensors. It was the cabling.
In a conventional BMS, the field devices are a modest share of the budget. The money goes into what it takes to reach them: cable trays, containment, penetrations through concrete floors and fire-rated walls, labour, ceiling access, after-hours work, reinstatement, and the disruption of doing all that above occupied tenancies. That is why building automation quotes for existing buildings so often come back at a number that ends the conversation.
Removing the communications cable removes that cost structure. LoRaWAN sensors are battery-powered, so they need neither data cable nor a local power supply — which also means they can go where a wired system realistically cannot: inside a plant room riser, in a remote tenant's ceiling void, on a rooftop tank, in a basement pump chamber. One gateway typically covers a building; a second covers a campus. Installation is measured in days rather than months, and mostly does not require the building to stop working while it happens.
New build
Lower first cost than a fully wired field layer, and the sensor plan can change late in the programme without re-engineering containment.
Existing building retrofit
The case that wired systems price out of existence. Occupied floors stay occupied; there is no chasing, no ceiling strip-out, no weekend shutdowns to run trunking.
Extending what you have
Already run a BMS on part of the estate? LoRaWAN reaches the parts it never covered, and the data can be presented alongside — not instead of — what you already operate.
You cannot report kWh per square metre that you never measured.
South Africa's regulations for the mandatory display and submission of Energy Performance Certificates became mandatory in December 2020, and the compliance deadline — extended once — fell on 7 December 2025. They apply to government buildings above 1,000 m² and privately owned buildings above 2,000 m² net floor area in the affected occupancy classes — offices (G1), places of instruction (A3), entertainment and public assembly (A1) and indoor sports and theatrical venues (A2).
- The certificate is issued by a registered professional under SANS 1544, and rates the building A to G.
- The metric is kWh per square metre of net floor area per annum — a measured number, not a modelled one.
- The certificate and its underlying data are submitted to SANEDI and published on the National Building Energy Performance Register.
- Industry reporting around the deadline put compliance below 10% of eligible buildings, with assessor capacity a growing bottleneck.
The deadline is now some months behind us, which means a large share of affected buildings are non-compliant rather than merely late. And the practical obstacle is usually the same one: the building has a single municipal bill and no idea how the consumption behind it is distributed. A monthly total tells an assessor what was used; it tells an owner nothing about where to intervene, and nothing that would improve the rating next time.
To be clear about our role: we do not issue Energy Performance Certificates — that is the registered professional's work, and it must stay so. What we provide is the measured, defensible consumption data underneath: submetering by floor, tenant, plant and end-use, recorded continuously and exportable in full. That is what an assessor needs to work from, and what turns a rating from an annual verdict into something you can actually manage between certificates.
One picture of the building, from meters to plant rooms.
Energy submetering
Consumption by floor, tenant, plant and end-use — HVAC, lighting, lifts, kitchens. The split that makes an EPC rating actionable, and that makes tenant recoveries defensible instead of apportioned by floor area and argued about later.
Water submetering & leaks
Bulk and tenant water metering with night-flow analysis — the same discipline we use on municipal networks, applied to a building. A running toilet on an empty floor is a real and common cost that nobody sees on a single monthly bill.
HVAC & comfort
Space temperature, humidity and CO₂ by zone, plus plant status and run hours. Comfort complaints get an evidence trail, and over-conditioning — the most expensive habit in most buildings — becomes visible.
Cold rooms & kitchens
Continuous temperature and door monitoring for hospitality and retail tenancies, with alerts before a load is lost rather than a logbook signed after it was.
Plant, generator & UPS state
Pumps, tanks, generator run-hours and fuel, UPS status, and whether critical plant actually restarted after an outage — the question every building manager asks the morning after.
Occupancy & utilisation
Room and floor utilisation for spaces that may be conditioned and cleaned far beyond what their actual use justifies — increasingly the argument that funds the rest of the project.
A wired BMS goes dark with the building. This one doesn't.
When the power drops, a conventional field layer stops reporting precisely when the building becomes most interesting: what the generator carried, how long it ran and on how much fuel, which cold rooms drifted, what failed to restart, and what the recovery surge cost. Battery-powered sensors keep measuring through the outage, and a gateway on modest backup keeps the record whole — buffered locally and back-filled when the link returns. The month's outage cost stops being an estimate assembled after the fact.
The trade-off, stated plainly.
LoRaWAN buys range, battery life and installation economics by giving up bandwidth and responsiveness. Devices spend most of their life asleep, downlink capacity is limited, and the data rate is low by design. That has one hard consequence worth stating before you buy anything:
This is a monitoring and supervisory platform, not a real-time control bus. Scheduling, setpoint changes and confirmed commands work well. Sub-second actuation and fast interlocks do not, and should not be attempted over LoRaWAN — those stay on local controllers where they belong, exactly as they would in any competent design. Any supplier offering you wireless real-time control of a chiller's inner loop is describing something LoRaWAN cannot do.
In practice this suits how buildings actually fail. Almost nothing that costs a building money is a millisecond problem: it is a floor conditioned all weekend, a leak running for three weeks, a chiller short-cycling since a setpoint was changed in March, a cold room drifting overnight. Those are measurement problems, and measurement is what this platform is built for. Where fast local control is genuinely needed, we integrate with the controllers that provide it rather than pretending to replace them.
LoRaWAN building management — common questions
Why LoRaWAN instead of a conventional wired BMS?
Because in an existing building the cabling, not the equipment, is what makes a BMS unaffordable — containment, floor and wall penetrations, ceiling access, after-hours labour and reinstatement above occupied tenancies. LoRaWAN sensors are battery-powered and need no data or power cable, so a building can be instrumented in days without disrupting tenants, and sensors can go where wired devices realistically cannot.
Can it control equipment, or only monitor it?
It does supervisory control — schedules, setpoint changes and confirmed commands — and monitoring across the building. It does not do sub-second actuation or fast safety interlocks, because LoRaWAN devices sleep between transmissions and downlink capacity is limited. Those functions stay on local controllers, which is where they belong in any sound design; we integrate with them rather than replace them.
Does this help with the Energy Performance Certificate?
Indirectly but materially. We do not issue EPCs — only a registered professional can, under SANS 1544. What we supply is the measured consumption data the certificate is calculated from and the submetering detail that shows where the kWh per square metre actually goes, so the rating becomes something you can improve rather than only report. The compliance deadline fell on 7 December 2025, for government buildings over 1,000 m² and private buildings over 2,000 m² in the affected occupancy classes. Certificates are issued only by SANAS-accredited inspection bodies and remain valid for five years.
Will it work with the BMS we already have?
Usually yes, and that is often the right answer for a partly automated estate. LoRaWAN data can be presented alongside an existing system, or bridged into it through standard building protocols, so the parts your current BMS covers stay as they are and the wireless layer extends into the parts it never reached. We would rather extend a working system than sell you a replacement for it.
How long do the sensor batteries last, and who changes them?
Multi-year life is normal for typical building sensing intervals, because the radio spends almost all its time asleep — the trade-off that also limits bandwidth. Actual life depends on reporting frequency and conditions, so we quote it per sensor type and design the reporting interval deliberately rather than defaulting to the fastest. Battery state is monitored on the platform, so replacement is planned maintenance, not a discovery.
What does a building cost to instrument?
It is driven by how many measurement points, which types, and how much integration you want with existing systems and billing — not by floor area alone. We quote a written cost band after a walk-through and a look at your utility bills. A useful starting scope is usually energy submetering plus HVAC zones on the worst-performing floors, which is where the first savings and the EPC evidence both come from.
Start with the floor that costs you the most.
A walk-through and a look at twelve months of utility bills is usually enough to tell you where the money is going and whether instrumenting it pays back.