Real plants, real data, and what they taught us.
Anything looks good on data you made up yourself. So we test on real plants
whose owners published their own exports, mark ourselves against the owners' own
documentation, and label every plant we show as real or simulated, so nobody is ever
misled.
A demo on data you invented proves nothing to the people who run plants. So we went looking for real ones whose owners had published their own exports. The best we found are Danish: the Avedøre wastewater treatment plant in Copenhagen, built to treat as much wastewater as some 350,000 people produce, and an office building at Aalborg University, its heating, ventilation and six rooms. Both were published by the researchers who studied them, with a paper describing every reading. Those papers became our answer key, opened only to mark our work.
Avedøre: 2 of 24 → 24 of 24 readings understoodAalborg: 0 of 188 → 151 of 188; every reading placed has the right meaning
When we first pointed the product at them, it understood almost nothing. After writing what a plant's naming means for wastewater and for buildings, the kind of afternoon's work an installation takes, it reads every Avedøre reading correctly and 151 of Aalborg's. The other 37 are measured in things like lux and seconds that it has no word for yet, and it asks about them instead of guessing.
Real data found real mistakes
Real files broke things that our simulated ones never had: exports written with semicolons the way Excel does on a Nordic computer; clock times that came out two hours wrong in a Danish summer; wastewater at 6 to 20 degrees mistaken for an unconverted electrical signal; every reading counted twice because the system also wrote a quality flag beside it. Each was fixed, and each would have met the first Norwegian customer on day one.
Honest about what is simulated
Our earliest demonstrations were simulated plants, and the console used to say so only in small print. Now every plant carries a label on its face, real, partly simulated or simulated, with its source, its owner and its licence across the top of the page. Someone who runs a real plant should never have to wonder.
What this is for
Norway has hundreds of waterworks and thousands of buildings run by people who know what every reading means, and fewer of them every year. What they know can be written down, checked against the plant itself and kept, so the next person on shift, and whatever software comes after us, starts from understanding instead of from scratch.