LoRaWAN for buildings: TTN, Helium, ChirpStack plug-and-play

LoRaWAN has emerged as the dominant IoT protocol for commercial buildings. Three reasons:

• Range: 1-5 km indoors, up to 15 km LOS
• Battery life: 5 to 10 years on an AA cell for a standard sensor
• Cost: sensor 30-80 €, gateway 150-500 €

Covering a 5,000 m² building with one gateway is enough. The catch: low throughput (max ~10 messages per day to stay legal in EU868). More than enough for supervision (temperature every 10 min) but not for video.

The Things Network (TTN) — open community, free up to 10 devices, paid beyond. Simplest to start.

Helium — global decentralised network, ~$10/year per device.

ChirpStack — open source self-hosted, recommended for multi-building deployments wanting full stack control.

Loriot — commercial EU provider with SLA.

For each provider, the connection is set up with Sensia during commissioning: you provide your API key and application ID, then Sensia automatically syncs your devices and their profiles.

You install a new LoRaWAN sensor in your building, register it with your provider. On the first uplink, Sensia detects the device automatically, resolves its profile in the 300+ model catalog (matching by LoRaWAN vendor_id/device_type or payload signature), decodes the values, generates the corresponding datastreams.

No manual input. If the device is unknown to the catalog, an LLM classifier automatically enriches the catalog in 30 minutes after ~10 observation uplinks.

Sensia maintains a catalog of 300+ LoRaWAN device profiles, mainly from common vendors:

• Dragino: LHT52, LHT65, LSE01, LTC2
• Decentlab: DL-DUS, DL-MBX, DL-LP8P
• Adeunis: Field Test, Pulse, Temp
• Milesight: EM300, AM103, WS101
• Browan: TBHV110

Each profile contains physical ranges, units, IPSO LwM2M mappings, typical cadence. The catalog is versioned — each revision tracked in an audit log.

LoRaWAN supervision is good, control is better. Sensia supports LoRaWAN downlink commands: send a command to an actuator (valve, relay, dimmer) via your provider's LNS.

The catalog includes payload templates for common actuators (Adeunis Pulse, Browan TBVP100, etc.). You configure business rules (« if room temperature > 25°C, close radiator valve via downlink »), Sensia emits the downlink, awaits the ack, retries if needed.

Not all your equipment will be LoRaWAN. For boilers, HVAC BMS, UPS units already installed that speak Modbus TCP or RTU, Sensia offers a Modbus fallback via a dedicated gateway — a Raspberry Pi with our docker OS image bridges Modbus → MQTT → Sensia cloud.

No legacy hardware modification, you keep your PLC in place and Sensia reads in parallel.