Building management
system data bridge
A selected set of HVAC and energy points from your building, read over Modbus and bridged to the cloud so owners and portfolio managers see every building in one place.
THE PROBLEM
Each building has a BMS. The portfolio has none
A building management system is designed to run one building: its AHUs, FCUs, chillers, pumps and meters. It lives on a workstation in the plant room or on a closed network. Owners with ten or fifty buildings, and facility management companies running them, have no simple way to compare them.
The BMS should keep running the building on its own protected network. What owners need is a defined set of points, such as supply air temperatures, plant status and energy, copied out safely to a platform built for reporting.
HOW WE SET IT UP
A defined set of points, bridged safely
Agree the point list
With the BMS contractor and the owner we agree which HVAC and energy points leave the building, and how often. A focused point list keeps the bridge simple and secure.
Read over Modbus
The gateway reads those points from the BMS controller, the Modbus devices themselves or an existing protocol gateway, as master or as a slave, whichever suits the network.
Outbound and encrypted
Data leaves over MQTT with TLS 1.2 on an outbound connection to RIOD Live or your server, into the cloud interfaces your IT policy permits.
BACnet sites
Where the points live on BACnet, a BACnet-to-Modbus conversion step is added to the design, scoped with the BMS contractor so the gateway reads the converted points.
AT A GLANCE
BMS data bridge in brief
- What is read
- Specified HVAC points such as temperatures, setpoints, plant status and alarms, plus energy meter points
- Hardware
- RS485 Modbus IoT gateway, Modbus RTU over RS485 and Modbus TCP over Ethernet, master or slave
- Connectivity
- Ethernet, Wi-Fi or 4G, chosen per site. MQTT over TLS 1.2
- Where data goes
- RIOD Live, or your own server, with API access, PDF and Excel exports with audit trails, and AI access through MCP
- Security
- Outbound TLS 1.2 connection into permitted cloud interfaces, point list agreed with IT
- BACnet
- BACnet points are converted to Modbus in a dedicated step, scoped per project
- Use
- Portfolio dashboards, alerts and reports across buildings
FAQ
Questions buyers ask us
How do we get BMS data into the cloud without opening the BMS to the internet?
A gateway reads an agreed set of points over Modbus inside the building and sends them out over an outbound, encrypted MQTT connection. The BMS network keeps its existing boundary and nothing needs to reach into it from outside.
Can it read BACnet points?
Yes, through a conversion step. The gateway reads Modbus, so for BACnet points we add a BACnet-to-Modbus conversion, scoped with the BMS contractor, and the gateway reads the converted points.
Does this replace our BMS?
It works alongside it. The BMS keeps running the building, and the bridge copies the points you choose to a cloud platform for reporting and multi-site comparison.
Can we compare energy across all our buildings?
Yes. Once each building's energy and HVAC points arrive in one platform with common names, they can be compared on dashboards and exported to PDF or Excel.
Managing more buildings than you can watch?
Tell us the buildings, the BMS in each and the points you care about. We will propose the bridge and the review steps with your IT team.