Jason Webb, managing director, Electronic Temperature Instruments Ltd looks at temperature monitoring in smart buildings.
Smart buildings promise constant awareness. From air quality to occupancy, lighting to energy demand, today’s building management systems rely on real-time monitoring data. Yet within this intelligent infrastructure, temperature monitoring continues to reveal the underlying vulnerability on the dependence of connectivity that doesn’t always hold.
Layered steel and thick concrete pose an environment where Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks, the backbone of most modern wireless sensors, can run into unexpected connectivity interruptions. And yet these are exactly the spaces in which the temperature accuracy is most critical. Areas such as data centres and HVAC zones all depend on consistent, reliable readings, but interference and dropouts can still happen with the wrong technology.
Beyond Wi-Fi: the case for radio frequency
To address this, some building technology specialists are turning to radio frequency (RF) communication. An innovative technology that's finding a new life within smart buildings.
Unlike Wi-Fi, RF systems operate independently of a building’s internet infrastructure. They use dedicated bandwidths and communicate directly between devices and base stations, offering greater penetration through physical barriers and more reliable performance in environments with high electromagnetic interference.
While not new, RF has been used for decades in industrial settings and early home automation, with its application in modern building environments now quickly evolving. As Wi-Fi networks become increasingly congested and power-hungry, RF offers a low-power, resilient, and interference-resistant alternative. By leveraging dedicated RF bands, smart buildings can achieve more reliable data transmission, extended sensor battery life, and greater scalability, all without relying on existing IT infrastructure.
Independence and resilience in critical environments
The core benefit of RF lies in its resilience. In facilities where system downtime or patchy coverage could risk asset damage, spoilage or non-compliance, RF offers a communication method that functions without reliance on internet access, cloud networks or repeaters.
This is proving especially relevant in the context of retrofitted buildings, hospitals, public-sector sites and complex estates, where network infrastructure can be fragmented or security restricted. In these environments, temperature is a regulatory and safety issue as much as an operational one. Having sensors capable of operating autonomously across multiple rooms or floors offers a much higher level of reassurance that everything is as it should be.
A shift in thinking, not just in hardware
Adopting RF isn’t just a hardware decision; it reflects a broader shift in smart building systems design. The industry has long focused on convergence: pulling everything into the same IP-based ecosystem for ease of use. But with increasing scrutiny on resilience, some professionals are now decoupling certain critical systems from traditional networks altogether.
In temperature monitoring, this means a move toward modularity. RF-enabled systems can be added without major rewiring or network permissions, and they provide standalone datasets that can be integrated into existing compliance software via secure gateways. For estates with legacy infrastructure, this offers a path to upgrade monitoring capabilities without a full systems overhaul.
Rethinking what “smart” really means
Temperature might seem a basic metric, but it underpins many of the decisions that smart systems automate, like when to cool, when to alert and when to intervene. If the signal used to gather that data is flawed or intermittent, the intelligence of the system suffers at its core.
In that light, the shift toward radio frequency-based temperature monitoring is not simply a question of better signal strength, it’s a question of designing for real-world reliability. As smart buildings grow more complex and their responsibilities more critical, the technologies chosen to support them need to be as adaptable as the buildings themselves.