Sensors and predictive maintenance in the community

Tuesday, eight in the evening, in the party room. On the agenda of the owners' meeting: the water bill for the common areas, which has climbed for three months in a row with no explanation. The caretaker suspects a leak under the garage. The building manager brings two quotes, one to open the ceiling and another to install sensors, and the meeting ends without a quorum for either. The scene is illustrative, but anyone who attends these meetings knows the script.

The sensor is cheap. The path to it is what costs. Since July 2021, when the five-year grace period set by Brazil's Law No. 13,312/2016 expired, every new condominium building in the country must meter water unit by unit. A year before that law, Law No. 13,116/2015 already required buildings for collective use, public or private, to be built with conduits and junction boxes for cables and optical fibre.

Together, the two rules deliver the skeleton of a connected community: a physical path for data and a metering point in every unit. What gets built on that skeleton is a design choice. That choice is what separates a condominium that manages complaints from one that manages information.

A connected community is an architecture problem, not a purchase

Brazil's National Internet of Things Plan, created by a federal decree in 2019, defines IoT as infrastructure that connects things to information technology devices "with interoperability". The same text lists cities among the minimum priority environments and includes regulation, security and privacy among the themes of its action plan. For a developer, the decisive word is interoperability. Sensors that do not talk to each other are isolated gadgets, not a system.

That is why we treat the subject as architecture. Start from what the law already requires, then ask which layers rest on that base: energy, access control, lighting, irrigation, pumps, lifts and reservoirs. Each layer only creates value if the data reaches whoever decides, in time to act.

During construction a conduit costs labour; after handover it costs a quorum

The strongest economic argument is physical. On site, running extra conduits, leaving spare room in shafts and placing network points in common areas is incremental work on a crew that is already mobilised. After handover, the same result means opening ceilings, closing off shared spaces and living with patched finishes.

The institutional cost weighs as much as the physical one. Article 1,341 of the Civil Code makes works in a condominium depend on the owners' vote: useful works need a majority, and works of mere improvement or comfort need two thirds. A technology retrofit competes for agenda time and cash with the leaking roof and the jammed gate. During development, the same decision belongs to the designer and is written into the specification.

A condominium born connected manages information. One that has to connect later manages works, quorums and patches.

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Predictive maintenance trades complaints for data

Among the duties the Civil Code assigns to the building manager in article 1,348 are preserving the common areas, preparing the annual budget and rendering accounts to the owners. Without telemetry, all three rest on perception: the pump that makes a noise, the bill that came in high, the resident who complained in the group chat. With vibration, current, level and flow sensors, the same routine rests on time series.

The mechanism is easy to describe and demanding to run. A deviation from normal behaviour triggers an alert, which becomes a work order with a deadline and an owner. The closed order feeds the history, which improves the next budget. Without that last link, the system produces alarms nobody reads. The value of predictive maintenance lies in the process, not the sensor: buying sensors without designing it buys a new source of notifications.

Water and energy are the layers with the most legible return

Individual water metering is the easiest return to see. Each unit answers for its own consumption, and the condominium spots losses in the shared network as the gap between the main meter and the sum of the individual ones. When that reading is telemetric, the leak under the garage from the opening scene shows up in hours, not on next month's bill.

On energy, Law No. 14,300/2022, the framework for distributed micro and mini generation, created the "development with multiple consumer units". In it, the installations serving the common areas form a separate consumer unit, under the responsibility of the condominium or its management. Telemetry of the common areas is what allows the owners to size generation, track credits and assess storage and vehicle charging with numbers rather than hunches.

Biometrics at the gate are sensitive data, and the factory password is the back door

Cameras with image analytics, facial readers and app-based access all process personal data of residents, visitors and staff. Brazil's General Data Protection Law classifies biometric data linked to a natural person as sensitive personal data (article 5, II), with narrower grounds for processing. The necessity principle limits collection to the minimum the purpose requires. A simple fine can reach 2% of revenue, capped at R$ 50 million per infraction.

The consequence for the design is direct. Before choosing a facial reader, define the purpose, the legal ground, the controller, how long images are kept and who may see them. The information security guide from the ANPD, Brazil's data protection authority, recommends replacing default hardware and software passwords, because attackers use them to attempt connections. In connected devices, changing the password is part of handing over the building, recorded in the acceptance report.

Interoperability and certification decide whether the system ages well

A development lasts decades; an electronic device, a few years. The architecture must allow suppliers to change without rebuilding the network. That means preferring open protocols, guaranteeing the condominium access to its own data in an exportable format and avoiding contracts in which the management software only works with one manufacturer's equipment.

At purchase, one regulatory layer tends to go unnoticed. According to the official Anatel service page, telecommunications products may not be used or sold in Brazil without certification, an act reserved to the agency. Routers and remote controls are among the examples, and a certified product carries a label with its certification number. Checking that number, device by device, belongs on the handover list.

Whoever owns the data decides before the first sensor goes live

A connected community changes the nature of the owners' meeting. Since 2022, article 1,354-A of the Civil Code allows meetings to be called, held and decided electronically. The conditions are that the bylaws do not forbid it and that the rights to speak, debate and vote are preserved. With telemetry, that meeting can vote on the budget looking at real consumption, failure history and cost per piece of equipment instead of estimates.

This calls for three decisions in the bylaws and house rules. Who controls the data collected in common areas. Which reports management presents, and how often. How each unit receives its own consumption without exposing the neighbour's. The InnovaSphere Platform organises that information for managing the development, but the rule of who sees what is a governance decision, written down before the first sensor is switched on.

Worked example: connected construction versus retrofit

The table uses hypothetical numbers, chosen only to illustrate the mechanism. They are not market data or a promise of results. Simple payback divides the investment by the monthly saving, with no cost of capital. The rows with a cost of capital apply compound interest of 1% a month, also hypothetical, and show how much the timeline stretches when money has a price.

The reading matters more than the numbers. With the same saving, the whole difference in timeline comes from the cost of installation: the decision belongs to the design phase. If management fails to turn data into action and the saving halves, the retrofit never pays back once capital has a cost. The R$ 10,800 saved each month is less than the R$ 15,840 the invested capital costs over the same month. Embedded infrastructure still closes the account, in 111 months.

The simulator on this page accepts the number of units, the operating cost, the saving rate and the investment per unit, starting from 20% and R$ 8,000 per unit. With 120 units, R$ 180,000 a month, 12% and R$ 6,000, it reproduces the 34 months in the table. With its default values, 100 units and R$ 200,000 a month, simple payback comes out at 20 months. Treat that figure as a ceiling to be tested against the development's own metering.

When it does not pay off

The first case is the small development, with few units and lean common areas. Fixed costs for the platform, support and sensor maintenance do not get diluted, and mandatory water metering plus a good maintenance routine delivers much of the benefit.

The second is the condominium with no structure to act on information. Alerts with no owner, no deadline and no accountability produce cost and noise, not savings. Before installing, decide who reads the dashboard and who answers for it.

The third is technology more invasive than the purpose requires. Facial recognition where a card solves the same access problem adds regulatory risk without proportional gain. The necessity principle is not an obstacle. It is a design criterion.

Checklist for a connected development

1. Check with the building services designer that conduits and junction boxes meet the telecommunications infrastructure law and leave room for future layers.
2. Confirm with the water utility and the plumbing designer the standard for individual water metering and whether remote reading is feasible.
3. Define with the development's legal team the controller, purpose, legal ground and retention period for every piece of data collected, especially images and biometrics.
4. Require suppliers to provide the Anatel certification number of every communication device and verify it at handover.
5. Include in the systems integrator's contract the mandatory change of default passwords, data export in an open format and the condominium's ownership of the data.
6. Size with the energy specialist the common-area consumer unit and the feasibility of distributed generation and storage.
7. Write into the bylaws and house rules, with the developer and the future management, who sees each report, how often management renders accounts and whether electronic meetings are allowed.

On this subject, InnovaSphere works in collaboration with two group companies. IncorpBuilding, the engineering arm with a native digital twin from feasibility to operation, designs the data network alongside structure and building services. InnCorPower, which develops distributed generation, storage and EV charging, works from the same consumption readings.

Frequently asked questions

Does individual water metering apply to every building?

No. The obligation covers new condominium buildings, from July 2021. For older buildings, or where individual metering is not feasible, the sanitation framework allows special contracts with the utility, setting out apportionment and billing rules.

Can a condominium use facial recognition at the entrance?

Yes, provided the processing fits one of the grounds in article 11 of the data protection law, respects the necessity principle and has adequate security measures. Biometrics are sensitive data, and the choice must be justified against less invasive alternatives, such as a card or a credential on a phone.

Who is responsible for data collected in common areas?

In our reading, the condominium, represented by the building manager, tends to act as controller, and the companies running the systems as processors, under the definitions of the data protection law. The exact arrangement belongs in contracts and governance documents, because it defines responsibilities before the ANPD.

Does a technology retrofit need approval at an owners' meeting?

It depends on the nature of the works. Useful works need a majority of owners, and works of mere improvement, two thirds. Necessary repairs may be carried out by the building manager without prior approval. Each project is classified case by case.

Is the simulator's result guaranteed?

No. The simulator starts from saving and investment assumptions, which you can change, to show the relationship between cost, gain and timeline. The real saving depends on the development, the equipment and, above all, on management's discipline in turning alerts into action.

Legal basis

• Law No. 13,312/2016: added paragraph 3 to article 29 of Law No. 11,445/2007 (individual water metering in new condominium buildings), in force five years after publication.
• Law No. 11,445/2007, article 29, paragraph 5: special contracts for buildings without individual metering or where it is not feasible.
• Law No. 13,116/2015, article 29: conduits, junction boxes and infrastructure for cables and fibre in buildings for collective use.
• Decree No. 9,854/2019, articles 2, 4 and 5: National Internet of Things Plan.
• Civil Code, articles 1,341 (quorums for works), 1,348 (building manager's duties) and 1,354-A (electronic meetings, added by Law No. 14,309/2022).
• Law No. 14,300/2022, article 1, VII: development with multiple consumer units.
• Law No. 13,709/2018 (LGPD), articles 5, II (sensitive data), 6, III (necessity), 11 (grounds for sensitive data), 46 (security) and 52, II (fines).