Home / What we build on / Relay & analog gear

Your oldest equipment has no data port.
It still has a story to tell.

Relay logic, dry contacts, 4–20 mA — the gear that predates protocols, doing the unglamorous essentials.

Not everything speaks BACnet. The exhaust fan from 1987, the unit heater, the old AHU, the panel with a run light and nothing else — this equipment fails the same slow way modern gear does, but nobody sees it coming because there was never any data to watch. Veritas Data brings it onto the same dashboard as everything else: a contact for run status, a clamp-on CT for current, a 4–20 mA or 0–10 V tap where a signal exists — wired in parallel, without rewiring or interrupting anything.

Dry contacts for run & fault status4–20 mA / 0–10 V analog signals read in parallelClamp-on CTs — no rewiring, no interruption
Legacy gear doesn’t fail differently — it fails invisibly. The first notice is the consequence: the hot room, the flooded pit, the smell of a burned belt.
  • Invisible runtime. Nobody knows how many hours that motor has actually run — so it’s serviced by calendar guesswork, or not at all.
  • The overnight failure. It stopped at 2 a.m.; the building found out at 8 — six hours of consequence for a failure a contact closure would have reported instantly.
  • Current creep. A slipping belt, a dragging bearing, a loaded-up fan — the motor pulls a little more current every week, and there’s no display anyone reads.
  • The panel light nobody watches. The run light works fine. It’s just that seeing it requires walking there — and it says nothing about what’s coming.
Why it matters

Old equipment runs the essentials nobody thinks about.

Exhaust and make-up air, unit heaters, old air handlers, transfer equipment — the gear too old to have a protocol is usually doing a job too basic to be allowed to stop. And because it’s discovered-by-consequence, every failure costs more than it should: the space overheats, the product spoils, the tenant calls, the tech gets dispatched to diagnose from zero. A contact and a current clamp cost almost nothing against one of those mornings.

Descriptive → Predictive → Prescriptive

What we build for gear with no data port.

The same analytics spine as the modern equipment — fed by the simplest signals in the building.

01 · Descriptive

What’s happening

Run status, current draw, and real runtime hours — on equipment that has never reported anything in its life.

  • Dry contacts — run & fault
  • Clamp-on CTs for current
  • 4–20 mA & 0–10 V signals
  • True runtime & start counts
02 · Predictive

What’s coming

Even simple signals trend. Current creep, duty-cycle drift, abnormal start patterns — flagged against each machine’s learned normal.

  • Current-trend early warning
  • Learned duty cycles
  • Abnormal start patterns
  • Stopped-when-it-shouldn’t-be alerts
03 · Prescriptive

What to do

Service by actual hours instead of guesswork — and a likely cause when the trend turns.

  • Runtime-based service flags
  • Belt & bearing checks, early
  • Failure found in minutes, not hours
  • Evidence for the work order
Interactive example

The equipment everyone forgot, on the same dashboard.

One old supply fan with a clamp-on CT and a run-status contact, with sample data — not a live system. The dashed line is the motor’s overload trip. Analog gear has no alarm before that point — unless someone builds one. Drive the scenarios.

Scenario:
AHU-7 supply fan · Installed 1987 SAMPLE DATA
--:--:--
Motor current · 30-day trend + projection
8.2A
overload trip · 14 A today → projected the breaker trips here
No trip projected at the current trend. Runtime logged — service by hours, not guesswork.
OKWATCHACT
Recommended action

95health score
Example dashboard · sample data for illustration · your build reflects your equipment and its trip points
How it connects

Wired in parallel. Nothing rewired, nothing interrupted.

  • Contacts & analog signals, in parallel

    Run status from a dry contact, process values from existing 4–20 mA or 0–10 V signals — landed on our gateway’s inputs alongside what’s already there. Electrician-friendly, familiar, reversible.

  • Clamp-on CTs — non-invasive

    Current sensing that clamps around the existing conductor. No lugs lifted, no circuit opened, no downtime to install.

  • Same dashboard as everything else

    The 1987 fan and the 2024 chiller, side by side, each with its own learned normal. One view, whole building.

Your equipment is never modified.

Parallel wiring, clamp-on sensing, observation only. The starter, the relay logic, the safeties — everything keeps working exactly the way it has for decades. We watch; we don’t touch.

// parallel wiring · non-invasive CTs · equipment untouched
Who it's built for

Buildings with history. Equipment with none.

Older buildings

Where half the mechanical room predates every protocol — and replacement isn’t in this year’s budget, or the next’s.

Light industrial

Fans, blowers, conveyors, heaters — simple machines whose stoppage isn’t simple at all.

Facility & service teams

Teams tired of discovering failures by walking into them — who’d rather get the contact closure at 2:01 a.m. than the phone call at 8.

If it matters, it can be watched.

Tell us what you run — even the gear from 1987. We’ll design the monitoring for it.

Book a consultation →

Horacio De La Cruz · 305.295.2729 · hdelacruz@veritas-data.io