Why Flexible Deployment Matters
Buildings are not uniform: a hospital, a data centre and a shopping mall have radically different distribution topologies. A one-size-fits-all wireless metering solution either over-engineers simple cases or under-engineers complex ones. Industrial Bluetooth shines when paired with the right topology for the site.
Scheme A: Pure Mesh for New Builds
In new construction, every distribution cabinet is designed with a meter plus Industrial Bluetooth module from the start. A single IoT gateway per electrical room collects data from up to 64 meters via Bluetooth Mesh and forwards it upstream.
No dedicated signal cabling is needed — the gateway connects to the building LAN over a single Ethernet drop per room.
Scheme B: Hybrid Mesh + RS485 for Phased Retrofits
Many retrofits must coexist with legacy wired meters. A hybrid scheme keeps existing RS-485 daisy chains operational while adding Industrial Bluetooth meters on circuits that were previously unwired. A dual-protocol gateway bridges both populations into a single Modbus TCP or MQTT stream.
This lets facilities expand monitoring incrementally without scrapping legacy investment.
Scheme C: Gateway Cluster for Multi-Building Campuses
For a campus with several buildings, each building hosts its own gateway cluster (1–4 gateways depending on density). Gateways communicate peer-to-peer over the campus LAN or over a private LTE / 5G slice.
A central energy platform ingests data from all gateways, providing per-building, per-floor, and per-circuit drill-down.
Topology Selection Guide
Use Scheme A when: greenfield construction, full control over electrical design, fewer than 200 metering points per building.
Use Scheme B when: existing RS-485 infrastructure, phased budget, mixed legacy and new meters.
Use Scheme C when: campus with 3+ buildings, need for cross-building analytics, central energy team.
Coverage Planning
A site survey identifies electrical room locations, metal-cabinet density, and floor construction (concrete vs. drywall). From this, the team calculates gateway placement to guarantee at least -75 dBm RSSI at every meter.
Rynon provides a coverage-planning worksheet based on building floor plans and a database of measured attenuation by material.
Commissioning Workflow
Each meter is bound to the network via a QR code on the meter body. The commissioning app scans the code, tests signal strength, assigns a logical address (e.g. "Building-A / Floor-3 / Circuit-12"), and pushes the configuration to the gateway in one tap.
A typical 100-meter deployment can be commissioned in 1–2 days by a two-person team.
Cost Comparison
Pure Mesh: ¥260/meter + ¥1,800/gateway. For 100 meters: ¥29,600.
Hybrid: ¥260/meter for new + ¥0 for legacy + ¥2,200/dual-protocol gateway. For 100 mixed: ¥31,400.
Gateway Cluster: as above plus ¥600/building for the campus uplink. For 4 buildings × 100 meters: ¥121,600.
All figures exclude platform subscription.
Conclusion
Industrial Bluetooth is flexible enough to cover the three dominant topologies encountered in building distribution. Choosing the right scheme early in the project cuts deployment cost and avoids the retrofits that drive up complexity later.