Home / What we build on / Diesel engines & gensets

The generator only has to start once.
Will it, when the power’s out?

Standby diesel — tested monthly, trusted daily, and silent until the day it matters.

A standby genset spends most of its life doing nothing — which is exactly the problem. Batteries fade, fuel degrades, coolant leaks, and connections corrode in the weeks between tests, so the failure shows up at the worst possible moment. Veritas Data designs and builds monitoring for diesel engines and gensets that watches the whole start chain continuously, so you find the weak battery on a dashboard, not during an outage.

J1939 & CAN reads the engine ECU directlyStart-readiness battery, fuel, coolant, vibrationCustom-built to your genset, not off a shelf
A genset that passes its monthly test can still fail three weeks later — and nobody knows until the lights go out.
  • The battery is the usual culprit. Starting batteries fade quietly; a genset that cranked fine last month may not have the cold-crank left to start today.
  • Fuel degrades and grows bugs. Diesel sitting in a standby tank oxidizes and can grow microbial contamination — clogging filters right when the engine finally needs to run.
  • Small leaks become no-starts. A slow coolant or oil leak, a loose connection, a failing block heater — each one turns a reliable engine into a gamble between tests.
  • The monthly test is a snapshot, not a watch. Everything can be fine on test day and fail in the 29 days nobody was looking.
Why it matters

The one machine you can’t test your way to trusting.

Backup power is insurance you only collect on once, without warning — and a genset that doesn’t start during an outage isn’t a maintenance issue, it’s a failure of the whole reason it exists. For a hospital, a data center, or a facility under code, that’s measured in safety and liability, not just downtime. Continuous monitoring turns "we tested it last month" into "we know it’s ready right now."

Descriptive → Predictive → Prescriptive

What we build for your genset.

The same analytics spine behind every Veritas system, engineered around diesel start-readiness.

01 · Descriptive

What’s happening

A continuous read on the whole start chain — from the engine ECU over J1939, and from sensors we add.

  • Battery voltage & health
  • Fuel level & quality
  • Coolant & oil
  • Run hours & load
02 · Predictive

What’s coming

Trend detection that flags the fade — a battery losing capacity, fuel trending bad, vibration rising — before test day, not after.

  • Battery decline trending
  • Fuel degradation watch
  • Vibration anomalies
  • Between-test alerts
03 · Prescriptive

What to do

A clear heads-up while it’s a battery swap, not a failed startup — with the records your compliance program needs.

  • Service-now alerts
  • Maintenance timing
  • Test-cycle logging
  • Readiness dashboard
Interactive example

What we’d put in front of you.

A focused view of one genset, with sample data — not a live system. Watch the battery voltage: when it drifts down toward the line, the most common cause of a no-start is building — weeks before the monthly test would catch it.

Genset A · 500 kW standby SAMPLE DATA
--:--:--
Battery voltage · last 60 min
12.5V
watch < 12.2 V
88readiness
Example dashboard · sample data for illustration · your build reflects your genset and your alert thresholds
How it connects

Onto the genset you already run.

  • Reads the engine ECU over J1939

    Modern gensets expose battery, fuel, temperature, and fault codes on the J1939/CAN bus — we read them directly, without changing how the unit runs.

  • Adds sensors where it can’t

    Older gensets without a data bus get add-on sensors — battery, fuel, vibration, coolant — so age is no barrier to knowing it’s ready.

  • One dashboard, every unit

    One genset or a fleet across sites — readiness for all of them in a single view, with the test records to prove it.

It watches; it doesn’t interfere.

We read the ECU and add our own sensors — but the genset’s own controls and safety logic stay exactly as they are. Monitoring that can’t interfere with a start sequence is monitoring a facility will actually allow.

// read the bus · add sensors · controls untouched
Who it's built for

Places where backup power isn’t optional.

Hospitals & healthcare

Where a genset that won’t start is a patient-safety event and code compliance is mandatory.

Data centers

Where standby power protects uptime measured in millions per hour and a failed start is unthinkable.

Facilities & property teams

Anyone responsible for a genset who’d rather find the weak battery on a screen than during the outage.

Know it’ll start — before you need it to.

Tell us about your genset — we’ll design the monitoring for it.

Book a consultation →

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