Customer Background
For over 80 years, our customer — an industry leader in water heating solutions — has been delivering excellence through their wide range of products, including boilers, pool heaters, water heaters, and more. Headquartered in North America, the company continues to be a water heating technology leader globally.
Customer Need
The customer wanted to leverage Industry 4.0’s smart device interconnectivity for their own products, thus offering convenience and ease of control over boiler solutions to their customers. They partnered with Softdel to build a smart mobile application for their new range of gas-fired condensing boilers. The application would enable users anywhere in the world to monitor and change boiler operating and heating parameters using only their smart devices.
Softdel’s Solution
- Softdel developed an intuitive mobile application that seamlessly connected end-users' smart devices, including phones and tablets, to existing boiler controls.
- To enable cross-platform functionality, Softdel built the app using the Flutter framework, which facilitated a common codebase for Android, iOS, Windows, and other web-based applications.
- Key features included monitoring device health and remotely controlling boiler parameters, reprogramming boiler functions, adjusting set-points, outdoor reset curves, and pump controls, and providing colour-coded status alerts for immediate action.
- Softdel also enabled the app with advanced notification functionality that lets users set up 24x7 updates via email and text alerts.
- As an extended functionality, the app would temporarily allow service or maintenance personnel access to device health, to resolve emergency operational issues.
Standards and Technology
Communication Protocols: Bluetooth
Framework: Flutter
Platform: Android and iOS
Programming Language: DART
Benefits
- Enhanced Performance: Remote access to real-time data about boiler parameters enables round-the-clock status alerts, thus improving reaction timings and reducing system downtime.
- Extensibility: The mobile app can extend its control over the customer’s entire family of boilers, gathering and storing historical data for multiple locations and multiple end-users.
- Easy maintenance: The continuous, real-time monitoring afforded by this solution improves the efficiency of the heating system and makes predictive and preventive maintenance more accurate, thereby facilitating swift responsiveness to any change in operating conditions.
