Why is there smoke coming from the boiler room? | Willem Vooijs<br>A case for taking your building&rsquo;s data back — and an argument that what you run at home belongs at work.<br>Someone walks into my office and asks a simple question: why is there smoke coming from the boiler room?<br>It&rsquo;s a fair question, and on this day a strange one. It&rsquo;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<br>, 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&rsquo;t.<br>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.<br>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&rsquo;s own system said why it was running. Nothing in the heat pump&rsquo;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&rsquo;s obvious. Seeing them side by side was the one thing none of our systems would let me do.<br>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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t undermine the gas-free promise. It&rsquo;s what makes the promise keepable.<br>Let me say where this is happening. I look after the technology at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam<br>— 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.<br>The Climate House dashboard in Home Assistant — desert, cape, and tropical zones with a live map of sensor locations.<br>This is not bad luck. It&rsquo;s a structure.<br>Here&rsquo;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.<br>We just don&rsquo;t control it. The vendor does.<br>Three things conspire here, and none of them are accidents. First, the data your building generates is owned, in practice, by whoever installed the system — handed back to you through a portal, a per-seat license, sometimes a charge per data point, on a platform you can&rsquo;t extend. Second, the systems are siloed by design, because interoperability was never in any single vendor&rsquo;s commercial interest. Third, the interfaces were built for a commissioning engineer, not for the botanist, the finance controller, or the director who actually has to decide something.<br>And it&rsquo;s drifting the wrong way, not the right way. Building controls are going the way of everything else: cloud portals you log into, capabilities moved behind subscription tiers, the standing risk that a product gets sunset and takes your history with it. The consumer world has a word for this slow decay of the things you depend on: enshittification. It is arriving in your business too.<br>The deepest version of the problem is the one I started with. Energy data sits in one system, building settings in another, and the question you actually care about — does this setting cause that cost — lives in the gap between them. No vendor sells you a product for that gap, because the gap spans two vendors. So nobody can cross-examine the building. Including you, who owns it.<br>Energy distribution, gas consumption, and electricity usage — all in one place for the first time.<br>Why this is solvable now, when it wasn&rsquo;t five years ago<br>Three things changed at roughly the same time. Take them as three legs of one stool.<br>The right. Since 12 September 2025, the EU Data Act gives any business user of a connected product the right to demand the data that system...